#172 - From Dropout to CEO—Kelly Roberts on Building a $15M HVAC Business

Summary

Owned and Operated - Episode #172: From Dropout to CEO—Kelly Roberts on Building a $15M HVAC Business

In Episode #172 of "Owned and Operated," hosts John Wilson and Garrett Moss engage in an insightful conversation with Kelly Roberts, the dynamic CEO of Moss Heating and Cooling and CFO of Moss Utilities. Kelly shares her remarkable journey from a college dropout to leading a thriving HVAC business with a $15 million revenue stream. This episode delves into her strategies for business growth, overcoming financial hurdles, scaling operations, and fostering effective team dynamics. Below is a comprehensive summary capturing the essence of their discussion.

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1. Introduction to Kelly Roberts

Kelly Roberts joins the podcast as a dual leader, managing both Moss Heating and Cooling and Moss Utilities. John Wilson introduces her roles, highlighting her significant contributions to both companies.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [01:31]: "I'm excited to be here and share our journey with your listeners."

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2. Kelly Roberts’ Career Journey

Kelly recounts her path from dropping out of college in 2012 to becoming a CEO. Initially working as a server, she transitioned into the HVAC industry through an air conditioning company, where she developed critical skills in customer service and professional communication under the mentorship of Donna Matkin.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [07:03]: "I took a chance on myself and learned everything from the front desk up to managing projects."

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3. Building Moss Utilities and Moss Heating and Cooling

Moss Utilities, founded in 2016 by Garrett Moss, rapidly scaled from $20 million to $175 million in revenue by 2025, becoming the third-largest utility contractor in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area. Simultaneously, Moss Heating and Cooling expanded to $15 million, focusing on high-end residential new construction.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [05:12]: "We are one of the only companies considered for certain large projects because of our size and equipment fleet."

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4. Overcoming Financial Challenges

In March 2020, amid the pandemic, the company faced severe financial strain when their CFO advised filing for bankruptcy. Kelly and Garrett narrowly avoided this by taking control of financial operations, hiring an interim CFO, and restructuring their financial strategies to stabilize and grow the business.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [11:27]: "We knew it was bad, but we didn't realize just how bad it was until our CFO walked out recommending bankruptcy."

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5. Shifting Business Models: Custom to Production

Initially, Moss Heating and Cooling pursued high-end custom HVAC installations in luxury homes, which proved less profitable due to intense competition and the intricate nature of custom projects. Recognizing the need for a more scalable model, Kelly pivoted towards a production-based approach, focusing on volume and efficiency to enhance profitability.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [14:35]: "We found out we could lose money in plumbing and Hvac new construction, so we switched to a production model that aligns better with our strengths."

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6. Scaling Operations

Scaling from servicing approximately 1,000 homes to an ambitious target of 2,000 required significant adjustments in infrastructure. Kelly emphasized the importance of leveraging subcontractors to manage labor demands and enhancing project management through tools like Monday.com to streamline workflows.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [19:43]: "We do all our labor with subs, which is essential to compete in the new construction market here."

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7. Recruitment and Team Building

Kelly highlights the company's commitment to attracting top talent by offering competitive salaries and fostering a positive work environment. This strategy ensures a steady influx of skilled project managers and design technicians essential for managing the increased workload.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [24:52]: "We pay people what they're worth, which makes it easy to attract and retain top talent."

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8. Marketing and Lead Generation Strategies

Marketing posed significant challenges for Kelly and her team. Traditional methods like commercials and radio ads yielded minimal returns. Instead, they found success through strategic partnerships, notably with Lowe’s, which accounts for about 65% of their change-out revenue. Additionally, leveraging the established brand recognition of Moss Utilities facilitated new business opportunities.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [27:30]: "Marketing has been the hardest thing for us to figure out. Traditional ads didn’t work, so we shifted to building strong partnerships."

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9. Service Department and Customer Retention

A robust service department is crucial for converting new construction clients into lifelong customers. Moss Heating and Cooling offers a one-year warranty and employs knowledgeable warranty specialists to ensure exceptional service. Kelly is exploring strategies to enhance customer retention, such as one-time maintenance visits to establish lasting relationships.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [36:41]: "Our goal is to convert new construction clients into our service business by building strong, ongoing relationships."

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10. Advice for Aspiring Leaders

Kelly offers valuable advice for those aspiring to leadership roles in the home service industry. She emphasizes the importance of proactive problem-solving, volunteerism in tackling challenges, and maintaining a positive attitude. Kelly also highlights the significance of being direct and persistent in addressing issues to drive company improvement.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [52:10]: "When you see a problem, raise your hand and volunteer to solve it. Think through problems deeply, and people will continually promote you."

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11. Kelly’s Pressure Tested Podcast

Beyond her corporate responsibilities, Kelly launched "Pressure Tested," a podcast dedicated to highlighting female leaders in the construction industry. This initiative underscores her commitment to empowering women and fostering a more inclusive environment within the trades.

Notable Quote:

Kelly Roberts [53:37]: "I wanted to create a platform to talk to and showcase the incredible women in construction, and it's been an amazing journey."

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Conclusion

Kelly Roberts' story is a testament to resilience, strategic pivoting, and effective leadership in the competitive HVAC and utilities sectors. Her ability to navigate financial crises, scale operations, and build strong industry relationships offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business leaders alike. Through her roles at Moss Heating and Cooling and Moss Utilities, as well as her advocacy for women in construction, Kelly exemplifies the qualities of a modern, adaptive leader driving substantial business growth.

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For more insights and detailed discussions, visit www.ownedandoperated.com and follow Kelly Roberts on LinkedIn.

Transcript

[Kelly Roberts]

A CFO comes in and he basically says, hey, guys, love y'all, but I'm leaving and I highly recommend that you file bankruptcy. We were looking at going from 7 million to 15 million, which is what we did last year. You know, we're trying to do 2,000 homes in New construction this year. I will be direct. I will tell you what you're doing wrong, and I will say it to you enough times until you hear me and be correct.

[John Wilson]

Recently we've been experimenting with lead aggregator, and one of the ones I'm most excited about is a company called Modernize. So what Modernize does is they do direct inbound calls for home improvement. So it's a direct phone call booking, which is way easier to book and has a much higher book rate than an Angie's List or something like that, where you have to sort of recontact them and try to find that customer. Modernize has a direct connection to our call center, so that's been a huge win. It also has some of the services that we've really struggled to get good leads for water heater replacements and H vac units and water damage, restoration and water quality. Those ones have been challenging for us to get leads and Modernize has been a really great partner for us. So make sure you check out modernize.com.

[Garrett Moss]

Welcome back to owned and operated. We have our co host here, John Wilson. Yeah, held it a little too long there.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, I think you did. I think easily too long. And. And we're blessed to have Kelly Roberts here with us today, too. Kelly, thanks for joining the show.

[Kelly Roberts]

Thanks so much for inviting me on. I'm a big fan of the show, so I'm excited to be.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, this will be great. Well, I'm. I'm glad you've been able to learn from it, hopefully in the past from the smart people we've had on. And I know you're going to share a ton of awesome stuff too, so this is going to be fun. Kelly is the CEO of Moss Heating and Cooling and the CFO of Moss Utilities. And you did in fact hear that correctly. I continue to recheck my notes. She got a lot going on. So, Kelly, I would love it if you just give us a little bit, like, what does a day to day even look like? And we're going to break this down because I'm fascinated. But, like, how do you do it?

[Kelly Roberts]

That's a great question. I think I take it day by day. When we originally started, a lot of deep breathing. When we first started Moss heating, cooling the idea was that I was always going to serve as CEO or general manager be in some capacity. I was already the CFO of Moss Utilities at that time when we decided to partner with the owner of Moss Utilities to start Moss Heating Cooling. But it took a while for the company to get just quite honestly large enough for it to take up my entire attention. And so that happened last year. We were looking at the year and we were thinking that we were about to double in size. So we were looking at going from 7 million to 15 million, which is what we did last year. And about April of that year, well, really we've been planning since about January, we decided to finally make the move for me to just move over to Moss Heating Cooling full time CEO. And so in doing that, we hired a CFO for Utilities and unfortunately it just did not work out. Um, a couple of months after we hired him, we, we were good friends with him and we just decided that we would part ways because it wasn't a good fit and we wanted to do it sooner rather than later. Utilities at that time was considering just a very important transaction, employee ownership. And it was going to take somebody that really knew the business to be able to help orchestrate that deal. And so I came back and we've just kind of taken a day by day sense. The idea is that, you know, eventually one day I'm going to have to choose because Utilities is a massive company. They do about $180 million of revenue a year. And so that is really a full time job. And then we have Moss Heating Cooling. You know, and it's really interesting the differences between the two companies. But from a transaction standpoint, Moss Heating Cooling has just as many transactions as Moss Utilities. It's just, you know, Moss Utilities transactions are so much larger. So one day I will have to.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, right.

[Kelly Roberts]

I'll have to pick aside one day. I just don't want to do it quite yet.

[John Wilson]

Can you explain? Just walk me. I don't understand $180 million in moss utilities. I just don't get it. So like walk me through this.

[Kelly Roberts]

So Moss utilities started in 2016. We are a civil contractor. So that's just a really nice way of saying that we put pipe in the ground. We put water, sewer and storm pipe in the ground. Garrett Moss started the company out of his garage. His dad had been in the industry. He's actually fifth generation, but his dad's business had gone out in 2008 and he didn't have any desire to get into this business. And one Day, he just decided to give it a. To give it a go. Grew very quickly. The first year, they did $20 million in revenue. Very quick. And so, you know, this is 2016. It's 2025. We just did 175 million last year.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

We are the third largest white utility contractor in DFW. We're one of the only people that can get considered for certain projects because of our size and because of our heavy equipment fleet. I wish I could explain how we grew that fast. I will tell you.

[John Wilson]

I mean, zero to 20, I mean, in that first year, was it like, subcontract? Like, I don't understand how the labor pool works on 0 to 20 million in a year.

[Kelly Roberts]

We are really blessed to be in the DFW metroplex, and we expect. And even in the beginning, we have pipe crews that just come into our business every single day looking for work. So we have about six people per pipe crew, about 36 pipe crews now. And we had. They had enough contacts in the industry to attract some labor, and we've just continued to grow that labor. We're lucky to be in this area. Lucky. It's, you know, a 100% Hispanic workforce, but there's just a ton of work here, and it attracts people to this area.

[Garrett Moss]

Are the contracts. Are the contracts more on the, like, municipality side, or are you working for, like, new home builders doing full subdivisions? Where. Where does that kind of fall?

[Kelly Roberts]

That's what's really unique about our company is we started out doing, you know, mostly commercial work, and we've been very lucky to diversify. So. So yes, we will do a subdivision. We will do a public infrastructure project, but we are mostly private development. So we are working in data center. We do data centers, schools, you know, trying to think multifamily. We do hospitals. We do multifamily. We do. We do it all. We did not go straight for subdivisions in the beginning because that's what Garrett's dad had done previous. I feel like you guys need to be talking to Garrett. But that's what Garrett's dad had been doing previously, and that took him out in 2008 because it was just a really hard time to be in that market. And so Garrett idea was always to diversify, and we've been able to do that and find some great partners along the way.

[John Wilson]

That's fascinating. I'd love to talk more about you. So you get into moss. How did you enter? How. How did you enter that?

[Kelly Roberts]

So it's kind of a. A long story of how I'VE gotten here. So it's kind of the typical story. I was a college dropout back in 2012, had done a year at TCU and realized that I didn't know what I wanted to do and definitely couldn't afford to pay tuition there. And so I'm kind of bumming around Fort Worth trying to figure out what I'm going to do. I've, you know, been a server at a couple different restaurants and I meet someone and they work for an air conditioning company. And it was a woman named Donna Matkin and she was the call center manager for a little air conditioning company out of Fort Worth. And she hired me. I have no idea why. I don't know what she saw in me at that time. I was a total bum and did not have any professional experience. You know, I remember her sitting down and really teaching me how to talk to customers, how to write an email, how to be professional, professional, how to be polite, how not to cuss. And you know, it's. She really, she really built me out of, you know, just like a regular server to a call center employee. And it was kind of right place, right time, but right as I was, I'd been there about six months when a bigger company from Dallas came in and purchased air. Right. Rolled them up underneath them. And then from there I just got great. One great opportunity after the other. We had an EOS implementer come in named Scott Long, who just like he, we just really, we were. It's kind of a meeting of the minds and he just spent the next few years pouring into me. So I, I went from, you know, kind of being the person calling and scheduling maintenances to running the service department for Crawford Services. And they were, you know, medium sized company, doing about 15 to 20 million dollars of revenue a year. Yeah, it was there that I met Garrett. Garrett was, you know, fresh out of ut, also didn't really know what he was going to do with his life. And he was working as a design tech because they had a big new construction department at Crawford. You know, that's how we met. You know, while we were both there, we met our spouses and just kind of continued a friendship. He ended up moving on and eventually starting Moss Utilities. And I was at a point in my career where, you know, as part of the executive team, I was part of all of the EOS stuff we were doing for Crawford. But I could not convince anyone to pay me more than $55,000 a year, regardless of what I did. And I just, you know, was. Was barely affording daycare. I was like, I can. I can do more than this. And I was like, and I'm gonna take a chance on myself. And so Garrett was on LinkedIn. You know, it's. We go back to LinkedIn a lot. I think LinkedIn is a huge resource for people. And I'm following Garrett along on this path of him starting this company, and all of a sudden it growing so big. And I'm just blown away that this is the same guy that I used to, you know, go out to Pete's piano bar with and stay out until 2 o'clock in the morning. Like, I'm like, what? What is going on right now? And so I just kind of had a blind faith go over and I'm like, Garrett, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do here, but let's figure it out. And he was like, okay, you know, let's figure it out. So I sat at the front desk and I was like, what did I do? You know, I left like this mid level management job to go sit at the front desk and fight with everyone to give me stuff to do because no one trusted me. I was like, you know, give me this, like, let me solve this problem. And I just KE asking, kept asking. And so eventually, one of the things that I got to do from the front desk is we had a CFO at the time who didn't know anything about construction accounting. He was great guy, but just didn't come from construction. We had just implemented a new ERP called Spectrum, and he couldn't figure out how to make the whip work. And so sitting at the front desk, I figured out how to make the whip work and how to enter projected costs. And after that, Garrett was pretty much like, okay, you can do whatever you want. What do you want to do? And I was like, well, I don't know, you know. So I was in accounting for a year, and then I was like, no, I want to manage projects. I want to look at what we do every day. And so I went out and, like, bought some Red Wing boots and a construction vest and started managing projects. And I learned how we put pipe in the ground. And it was such a cool experience to get to see what we actually do on that side. So I spent about a year and a half doing that. And then that's when we really got into a lot of financial trouble. And I think that, you know, we just had a kind of a crazy situation where we had a CFO at the time, you know, great guy still really good friends with this guy, but just got us into kind of a pickle a little bit. You know, the. One of the hard things about construction is retainage.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

And we were just having an incredibly difficult time cash flowing the business. And so we did what anybody who's in a cash flow struggle does. You know, we took a merchant cash advance and we got into an asset based lender. And, you know, at some point we're paying like 18% on our, you know, four and a half million dollar revolver. And basically we're just crushed. We're crushed under the weight of it. And so this is like March of 2020, which.

[John Wilson]

Okay.

[Kelly Roberts]

As you guys know, what happens in March of 2020. And yeah, it was a tough time. So a CFO comes in and he basically says, hey, guys, love y'all, but I'm leaving and I'll give you one week and I highly recommend that you file bankruptcy. And so then it was just me and Garrett kind of looking at each other like, what the hell just happened?

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

Like, we knew it was bad. We didn't know it was that bad. He's pretty much like, tell me who to train on the bank rec as I'm walking, you know, as he walks out the door. And Garrett's like, well, Kelly, I guess just turn Kelly on it. So, so I learned how to do the bank rec and then we hired an interim CFO who is a cpa. And he spent the next two years coming into the office for eight hours a day, just pouring into me and teaching me everything I know about being a CFO. It was in 2021, before we ever really had utilities figured out or we decided to start moss Heating Cooling. I have no idea why we did that. It was a terrible idea.

[John Wilson]

We were out of about terrible. I mean, it sounds like it works. It works.

[Garrett Moss]

So, yeah, maybe bad timing.

[John Wilson]

I mean, hearing the story, I'm also like, interesting pivot.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah. You know, well, we got really bless in utilities, as you guys know. It's. It's Covid right at that time. And so, you know, we had just, you know, kind of right place, right time. We had, you know, PPP come in and help us.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

Get going. And then we had a bank come in and just be such an amazing partner to us and really see what we were capable of before we were capable of it. And they came in and they structured a deal that helped us get. Helped us get here. And so, you know, by 20, but 2021, we are doing a lot better financially. Our projects are starting to make money, we're starting to cash flow and my husband has been in the heating cooling business forever. And with him and a partner that we had, we decided that we would start Moss Heating Cooling. And that company was going to be focused on doing high end residential new construction for H vac and high end residential plumbing. Took us a couple years to figure out that we are not plumbers.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

Nor should we ever be plumbers. Yeah, we lost. Yeah. It ate our lunch. Like.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, I, I remember plumbers. I talked to a company, it was, this was like early on in my career and, and they were primarily new construction, but they were plumbing and they, they did the same thing. They're like, it was awesome. Because we found out we could lose money in plumbing and H vac new construction. I was like, that' yeah, yeah, you definitely can.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah, that's, that's available to you especially, you know, we, when we just went after this like really high end custom world and there's, there's absolutely nothing wrong with high end custom. You know, we do, I don't couple, couple million dollars of high end custom work and H vac now and there's definitely a place for it. It's not as lucrative as it was about 10 years ago.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

Because there's a lot of competitors in the market. You know, like 10 years ago, Crawford could throw a bit out there for just a crazy amount of money and people would just kind of take it. Now, you know, they shop around a little bit more. So there's just not a ton of profit in it. It takes about three years to build a high end custom home.

[John Wilson]

So really, like how big? Like is that, like 12,000 square foot or like what are we talking about?

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah, we've done, we've done all kinds of cool projects. You know, we've done things from, you know, 10,000 plus to 15,000 plus. I mean, some of these houses are so intricate and it really does. It'll take three years to close those projects out. And so if you just kind of think about that and just think about it from like a profitability fate standpoint, like you start out, you think you're doing pretty good. Keep going, keep going. And then by that last year, you're just doing warranty because it's such a, you know, such a massive system that you created. You basically installed a huge commercial application. You know, because we've done geothermal VRF and just. It's not a lot of money at the end, just to be perfectly honest. Yeah. You know, I hope that we figure out how to do those more profitably. But we haven't figured that out quite yet. So that's why we really switched to like a production, more of a production type model which we, we like a lot more.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. Do you think you said 10 years ago it was like a different environment for custom. Do you think that there was just because there was less people? I mean fresh out of 09, like I remember that well of like what the industry was like. So was there just less people willing to jump on new construction or like what was different?

[Kelly Roberts]

A really interesting lens of what that world looked like because I worked for a company that was kind of willing to and always say yes. You know, if somebody. And this was really before we knew about geothermal or knew about brf. And you know, it was always kind of oh yeah, we've done that a thousand times, let's go try to do it, let's go do it. And, and so we had some really just crazy profitable projects. And I've seen contract values in the million plus for a residential construction home just for the H Vac. And so I just don't think that those projects exist quite like they used to. And I think that also people figured out that we're still pretty new on some of that technology. And like there's a company here in DFW that exclusively does vrf. And if somebody was to call me tomorrow and be like, hey, will you install this really complicated VRF system in my 20,000 square foot home? I might be like, you know, there's a company here that does that and they're gonn do it a lot better than we are.

[Garrett Moss]

I mean it's a great lesson. It sounds like in do what you're good at and don't spread yourself too thin across all different platforms and areas. Because I mean we talk about that a lot on here is newer, newer contractors like to do a little bit of everything. And it sounds like it just bites you in that at the end of.

[Kelly Roberts]

The day it really does. You know, we're still, we're still figuring it all out. Like I, I think that, you know, we've been really lucky to grow top mine like we have. But we are still very much figuring it all out. You know, the type of production work that we do, we kind of stay away from the low end residential application and kind of go for more higher end residential production applications. So we're talking, you know, two, three systems, maybe sometimes four system production homes. I mean things are just kind of different in Texas. People come here, they build these huge McMansions for this, you know, the same cost of like an apartment in California. So there's just a lot of. A little opportunity for that type of work here.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, we had Matt Ballard on maybe two months ago and he has sun. Sunrise. Sorry, Matt. I'm pretty sure it's sunrise. But he has sunrise in Vegas. And I think it's probably like similar, like hot. Lot of money because, like, I don't think, I don't think Cleveland has what you're describing. Like, that's not a thing. That's not a thing here. Like it would be with. I'm trying to imagine what that would look like. There's Ryan Homes. I don't know if that Ryan Homes is in Texas, but it's sort of these like builder grade, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what we see up here. So I'm like, I'm trying to envision this and I'm, I'm having a hard time because I'm just. That's what I'm used to for production. Not like million dollar, multi. Million dollar production homes.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah. And that's really kind of our target is that million plus home which they just build, you know, they build thousands and thousands of them here. You know, we're trying to do 2,000 homes in New construction this year. And they're all, you know, like, if we were to sit down and look at an average system count, I would put it at, I'd put it at probably two is what I would say. Two systems. I almost want to say two and a half, but I'm going to say two.

[John Wilson]

How many homes did you guys do last year?

[Kelly Roberts]

We did, right around a thousand.

[John Wilson]

I don't understand this. So like, explain it to me. Like I was gonna say five, but maybe like eight. Like I'm, you know, I'll. A little bit. What is the infrastructure requirement to go from a thousand to two thousand homes?

[Kelly Roberts]

Well, so Texas, we, we do all of our labor with subs. Okay. That's. That's the only way that you can compete in the new construction market here. And it's funny that you said sunrise. So that was actually the first owned and operated podcast I listened to because I was talking to somebody and they said, oh, you're new construction. You have to listen to this podcast episode of this guy who's doing it out in Vegas and kind of how they're making money. And I actually took that episode and went and beat and went and talked to. I say beat up. I shouldn't say Beat up. But I went and talked to all my vendors. I was like, gently beat up. You're better going back to all of them. I was like, you know, I just think that they're relieving money on the table here. And like, yeah, sure. Like, I think that that's such an important thing. Like if they just go unchecked and I'm kind of off topic, but you have to go back and talk to your vendors every single year or you're leaving money on the table. I think that I was able to kind of negotiate about a 6% decrease and our, you know, largest vendor on material pricing and you know, like, with this type of new construction, we're looking for about $1,000 a home. That's what we want to make. And so if I can negotiate 6% discount on materials, like, yeah, we're getting somewhere, we're doing something. Yeah, go ahead.

[John Wilson]

Well, just the nature of how fast your business changed. Like, I don't even think once a year is enough. Like if, hey, you're saying I'm gonna double. I'm sure the previous year was 500 or something. Like, that's like once a quarter in. In my, like, hey, our business is actively growing. Like, I don't. If you're putting in 4,000 boxes, like, you can do a lot of damage. Because if it's two systems per home, like, that's crazy. Yeah, I would be.

[Kelly Roberts]

One of. One of the cool things is we get this like national account pricing. So when you do this type of work, like Linux is already, you know, created all these contracts with different home builders. So we're really kind of tied to some of those numbers. So where opportunity for savings is really the material, you know, duct work. I mean, anything that we use on those jobs and then the ability to figure out how to use less, that is what our focus is this year. How do you look? How do you use less?

[John Wilson]

So, yeah, that's interesting. Have you. Have you visited Matt's place?

[Kelly Roberts]

No, but I would. I would get on a flight tomorrow.

[John Wilson]

You want like an intro? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one of my directors is going out there in a week or two. Like, we're not new construction, but I think he does. They're just such a machine. Like the, like the pre production is. Is incredible. And like, I think that's their magic in. You know, I'm not trying, you know, Matt, don't listen to this, but I'm not trying to inflate his ego too much. But yeah, it's a machine. But yeah, I'll introduce you. You should go. So back to infrastructure request, because I'm still just like a thousand to two thousand homes. So we subcontract that. That one. That makes some sense, but also that's still like a lot, like, that's doubling our labor. What happens with, like, do you need another purchaser or two? Do you need more PMs? Like, what does this look like? What did you have to change to double?

[Kelly Roberts]

Well, we're constantly looking for good talent. We are one of those companies who, you know, when we were. So we were all at Crawford and we were all at other companies. And I think that the thing that really made us want to start this company is we wanted to. We wanted to pay people they were worth. That was always something that was very important to us. So it is very easy for us to attract people because we pay people a whole lot more than everyone else does. And so when we say, hey, we need a project manager, there's about four people in our building that are going to call previous companies that they worked at and get us fresh labor in the door the very next day. So it. So it looked like project managers was the big thing because that's who really manages the entire project. We allow them to purchase for the project. We allow them to schedule the sub. So it was increasing project managers. The one thing that we're really trying to increase this year, so we have a design team in house, and we have added some really great talent to that team. We can sometimes be bad about kind of hiring somebody that's somebody's brother because we like them. And we're like, hey, we're going to give that person a chance. And so they kind of come in and they, like, teach themselves how to do, you know, duck design. And so every single year, we get a little bit more skilled labor in the door. And so we just hired this woman who I'm just so excited she's here, and she's just got all these ideas already. And so I think that the thing that we always do is we ask people what they think. Like, okay, where are you at? Do you. Are you overloaded? Are you not? What would you do to make this better? And we listen and, you know, so we were kind of at a point with the design team that they were like, okay, we're overloaded, and we don't really know how to get to the next stage. So that's when we decided to bring in a new design person.

[John Wilson]

The. The PM role. Thank you. The PM role is really interesting to me. Like how? I just want to understand that more. So how many houses can a PM manage a year? And like how do they, how do they win? Like what does that look like? Because that's a ton of responsibility. Like you can buy, you can plan labor. Like I'm just imagining that's a lot, that's like a lot of control. So how do you like set that role up for you and them to win?

[Kelly Roberts]

That's a great question. When I've completely figured that out, I'll answer it. But no, what we've done right now is we just try to give them resources, you know, so we have superintendents in the field that oversee the labor that gets done. So we have a really cool pro workflow called Monday.com and that's kind of helped us create like our PM task everything from start to finish of a project. PMs can handle a lot. I mean I think that we might, we've had weeks where we a PM had 50 different roughs going on that week. And you know, that kind of ebbs and flows through the summer months. We're kind of trying to figure out what our capacity level is per, per pm. And we're also looking at is it time to bring in just a purchasing person where all they do all day long is just purchase. Because to be perfectly honest, like we haven't figured out how to make the profit we want to make yet, you know, and I think the, one of the things that the biggest issue for us is material and it's, you know, is it a question of do we just over order? Is it a question of should the PM not be the only person responsible for ordering? There's a lot to it. Now one thing that we do, at least I think we do it well, is we manage fade on projects well. So because of my background in accounting, one of kind of the very first things I did for this company was get them on an ERP that's construction focused. So every single month they're sitting down, they're looking at their wip and I've even added this third party software called Brick that helps us do all of our WIP reporting. And so they, every single month they get in, they see a list of all of their projects and they tell me how much cost they have left on that project to complete it so that we can carry a proper under over billing on those. And they're just in it. They're looking at their, they're looking at their costs all the time. They have a really great platform and spectrum which Is our ERP to be able to get in and look at job costs. They're responsible for approving their invoices too. So as invoices come in, you know they compare it back to our or book price and they're, you know, they're really responsible for ensuring that that job comes in on. On budget.

[Garrett Moss]

Just answer the phone is one of those phrases that's always easier said than done. I know it was hard for me in my business because the phone always rings while you're out in the field trying to get something done or it's 8pm and you're trying to get your kids to bed. Well, I have the solution for you. I'm extremely excited today to announce quick staffers your go to solution for building a high performing cost effective customer service team. We are placing CSRs who have been pre trained on proven home service SOPs and scripts. The same ones that Wilson and I use in our business. For a limited time we're offering $500 off your initial placement cost for the first 10 signups. See link in the description below or head over to quickstaffers.com for more information.

[John Wilson]

Is there like a bonus by job or by month or like how do you compensate so that they win?

[Kelly Roberts]

That's great. I came from a world where everyone has. They're kind of tied to a number and tied to an incentive based on. On a number. We have not got our project managers on that yet. Now I will tell you they are paid very well from a salary perspective but we're just not to the volume level where we want to, where we're starting to think about things like that and how we get them more involved in saving, you know, instead of ordering the extra bag of flex, not ordering that extra bag of flex because it gives you an extra two, you know, extra $50 on the job or whatever that number is. So we're trying to figure out how we can reward them where it's a win win for. For both us and the company or for them and company.

[Garrett Moss]

So you guys did 7 million last year. How, how many project managers did that take?

[Kelly Roberts]

So 1.2 million the first year, the second year 7 million. But remember this is when we have plumbing. So we're doing plumbing service, plumbing, new construction and then H Vac new construction, mostly custom at that point and then service and change out. We were really lucky to be blessed with a retail partnership in Lowe's. So we do about 65% of our change out through them which is, you know, there's ups and Downs to that won't get into that a ton yet. But that was the year we decided that we weren't going to do plumbing anymore because we just really, we, we lost a ton of money on plumbing.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

God bless anybody that knows how to do new construction plumbing. So the next year, you know, we stay, we stay stagnant. We do 7 million again because we've lost about just a big portion of our business and service and new construction plumbing. And so right about the end of. So I guess that's 2023, we really start developing some great big relationships with production home builders where they are confident in us. They start turning over neighborhoods to us that other contractors have and it goes kind of like gangbusters a little bit overnight. So at one point we're sitting with a backlog of about 1.2 million. So July of 2023, a backlog of 1.2 million. By about April of the next year, we have a backlog of 20 million because we have created. Wow. Yeah, we've just created so many partnerships and people are just really starting to trust us and they turn over so many different neighborhoods to us. We get into a great relationship with Taylor Morrison doing builder rent projects. So that's the other market that's just kind of going kind of crazy in DFW right now is builder rent projects. And you know, so those are 300, sometimes 400 unit.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

Contracts. You know, so we had a contract of, you know, two and a half million for Taylor Morrison and you know, those just kind of came to us very quickly. And so we spent 2024 going through that backlog. You know, right now we have a 24 million dollar backlog in new construction. So we're hoping to hit that, you know, 15 million mark just in new construction alone this year. Yeah.

[Garrett Moss]

As two guys who are residential service only. Can you talk more about like, I love B2B. I've always been super interested in it. John has zero interest. And, and so we never see.

[John Wilson]

I've lost a lot of money. There's something about losing millions of dollars.

[Garrett Moss]

Yeah, you missed once and you're, you're in, in some trouble. But can you talk about more of that relationship building and like what going into that. Right. You, you're switching how you're looking at who you're going to go after, I guess who you're going to, who you're going to work with. I mean that's a big shift. Do you guys have sales development managers or like who's making those contracts? How does that all work.

[Kelly Roberts]

So we are really blessed to be part of a much larger organization in Moss Utilities. So you can drive down any highway in dfw, you're going to see this great big Conex with Moss Utilities on the side of it. And so because our name is also Moss, it's been really. I can walk into anywhere with a Moss Heating Cooling name tag and they're like, oh, I know who Moss is. I'm like, like you probably actually don't know who Moss Heating Cooling is, but you don't, you do know who Moss Utilities is. And so we were really able to leverage some of those pre existing relationships to get in the door. And once we were in the door, we had the right people to keep the relationship going. We try. We, you know, we do the same things everybody else does. At the end of the year, you know, we'll get all these really cool gifts and we'll go visit with each one of our home builders and talk about the year and. But constant communication. But we don't have a business development person. My husband works for the business and that's really his role is to you know, really pre construction so review all the bids, make sure that they're going out when they're supposed to go out. Go, go walk the job site with somebody. Go talk to the, talk to this manager. So he kind of handles that portion of the business. But it was really just the name recognition from Moss Utilities that helped the relationships we already had in the market. And then it's actually really funny, but largest home builder came to us from our, one of our competitors called Tempo Mechanical. So Tempo is very much like Sunrise. They do kind of a lower end production model where they're going in and doing one system homes and they even prefer for those houses to be one story because they just know how to do this so efficiently. And we could never really touch what they do in that particular market. And they were dealing with a home builder that just didn't really fit that. And they called us up one day and was like, hey, we, we, we would love to introduce you guys to this home builder. And you know, they introduced us. We probably do two, three million dollars with that home builder now every year. So it's just, it's just kind of funny how things just right place, right time. So a lot of luck basically. That's what I'm trying to say. We were just really lucky.

[Garrett Moss]

Well, let me do the brand recognition thing is cool though. I mean the fact that you're able to leverage that. Yeah. And it's already. People already know the name, especially in construction. Like, it's right up. It sounds like an easier transition than to start up from zero and just start knocking on doors.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah, that's the other thing that was really cool and, you know, sometimes really frustrated me about Garrett is Garrett spent so much money on marketing and logos and branding before we ever had any of that money to spend. And I just remember I would get so mad at him because he would. He would put moss on absolutely everything. And I will tell you, that was the smartest thing he could have ever done because the moss name is so well known in dfw and we just. And Mossy and Cooling just really gets to ride their coattails on that. And so, you know, if again, before we had the money to do it, we still don't really have the money to do it, but we've just been really great about branding. Our trucks look great.

[Garrett Moss]

That's awesome.

[Kelly Roberts]

Our uniforms look great. Everybody's got, you know, nice north face jackets. We just, we try to, you know, if you get into EOs, like, one of our uniques is that we care about our image, we care about what people see. And so that's really helped us.

[John Wilson]

We were once described, and you guys probably do this way better than we do just because of sheer size, but we were once described as omnipresent. And I, I think, yeah, I, I think that's probably a huge win for you guys because I think, like, people don't probably really remember. They just remember the moss and like, yeah, that's gonna do it. That's amazing. All right, so first year 1.2, second year 7, third year 7, fourth year 15. That's a lot.

[Kelly Roberts]

A lot.

[John Wilson]

That. That sounds like fun how much, like, there's a service component in here too that we haven't touched on yet. So, like, what does that look like? Is it the same crews? Is it captive labor? Is that subcontractors too? Or like, walk us through that part.

[Kelly Roberts]

So we have, we provide a one year warranty to every home that we service. We have two warranty guys and we stole those warranty guys from one of the biggest, best companies. They are paid extremely well because they are extremely knowledgeable and they run all of our warranty for us. Now we have a really small service department for a company our size. We actually only have, outside of those two warranty guys, we have three technicians and now we've gotten up to five or six and, you know, kind of ebbs and flows with the summer months. I won't get into how difficult it is to manage technicians because I'm sure you guys already know that. But so, you know, right now we have three technicians in our service department. And so really our goal, and we haven't quite figured out how to do this, but it's one of our primary goals this year is to really learn how we convert the new construction client to a lifelong service customer.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

And we're, you know, we've played with all kinds of different ideas there. It's sometimes it's kind of hard to get the builder to give us the information of who's moving into that house, which is just really silly to us. And so, you know, we've considered the idea of, you know, doing a one time maintenance for each of those customers to just gain their, gain their information, create a relationship. And so that's really how we plan to grow. That service side is just converting new construction clients to our service business because you know, our service and change up business has only grown because we, you know, year two developed a relationship with Lowe's because we had a manager here who had a relationship with Lowe's and they gave us 27 stores in DFW. Believe me, I know that like one of the no no's of starting your own business is to develop a retail relationship. They're discounted. Like I know the, I know the why we weren't supposed to do this, but we did and you know, so now we do like 65% of our revenue out of Lowe's and we're really hoping we just, we're on the precipice of getting another retail relationship, one that is very coveted in dfw. And I can't talk much about it yet, but if we get it, we're really hoping that that grows our change out business by about 2 million, 2 to 3 million dollars just change out per year.

[John Wilson]

So one of the, one of the people I admire the most in our industry, her name is Ashley and she runs a massive business in Ohio. It's a three location like very large business. And they got up to three locations and they got up to, they're between 50 and 100. Just pure residential swap out out. And the first like 20 years, all they did was Lowe's and Home Depot and like that was all they did. And that carried them through like 40 million freaking dollars. And then they just, they transitioned away from it and became like a retail, like a, just a normal, you know, service provider. But they just kept growing. So I mean, she's amazing. And their business Is amazing. And she's. I think she's coming on the show in the next couple weeks and we're gonna like deep dive into it because it is fast. Yeah, it's really interesting and like we've tried to make those relationships too because I. Volume's volume. So yeah, no, I'm all about it. I think that's great. 27 is amazing. That's a ton of stores.

[Kelly Roberts]

Hey, you know, so that really is what built our change out department pretty much overnight.

[John Wilson]

Have you guys thought about white labeling the. The Lennox boxes or something like that?

[Garrett Moss]

Or at least the boom stats?

[John Wilson]

Yeah. We bought a couple new construction companies over the years and like we still get service calls from them with it. It did exactly what they wanted it to do. It just did it for the next owner, which was me. And it was great. But they. I was like stickers on water heaters and. But in H vac. Like I don't know if Lennox does it, but Goodman definitely does. Where you can white label it or there was a company where near we are and they covered the whole front of the box. I don't know if you guys are interior, exterior, like Phoenix or something, but they covered the whole in front of the box with like a two foot tall sticker. Like it was absolutely egregious. But nobody could. Nobody could cover it up.

[Kelly Roberts]

I love that. That's a great idea.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. I mean, because if that's the easiest way, like we still get phone calls from hey, R and R plumbing, put in this water heater in 2005. And I'm like, yeah, it's crazy. Like those stickers build. They do it.

[Kelly Roberts]

The stickers do work. We. We put the stickers on. We're hoping. You know, I feel like we're still relatively new, so we're kind of waiting for those first service issues to happen where they're calling in on the number.

[John Wilson]

It's like the moss truck thing. Like, you'll be happy in a decade.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yes.

[Garrett Moss]

Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

You'll be like, man, that was the.

[John Wilson]

Best idea I ever had.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah, it did. So all for those ideas.

[John Wilson]

Time I didn't have the money. It's going to be the same thing. We're going to talk again in the decade. It's going to be great. You're growing on the back of a new construction. Like a high end new construction, production, new construction and then retail partnerships.

[Kelly Roberts]

Yep.

[John Wilson]

And I mean, you've really been able to blow up out of. Can you give me a sense of how many houses get built in dfw? A year? Because I have no, I have no concept.

[Kelly Roberts]

Oh, gosh. I. I couldn't tell you, but I know that we have three or four relationships with builders that build at least three to 4,000. So I mean, it's got to be just a ton. A ton. That's a great. That's a great question. Yeah, that'd be a really interesting way to measure our market, like saturation too. Yeah, that's great.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at 2,000 homes a year and I'm like, is that, is that all the homes? Probably not. I mean, DFW is crazy or is that like 2% of the homes crazy?

[Kelly Roberts]

I mean, I think that like 95, 000 people moved here just last year. And so, yeah, you guys definitely.

[John Wilson]

You guys all need to calm down. I. I think this is coming from somebody that like lives northern Ish. I, I think that Sunbelt states are just wild. They're just absolutely wild to me. Like, I went to. I went to Dallas in August last year and first off, it was disgusting. It was like 110 degrees or something outrageous. And then like, I don't understand how 95 people move to a city that like basically doesn't have water. Like, I don't get it. I like, where do you guys get the water? Like, I visited Phoenix and they're like, yeah, we're growing like crazy. And like, you have no water. Like, how are you growing?

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah, you know, it's funny, I just said I like invited to something where the governor was speaking and like the majority of it was about that. It was like totally over my head though. So I don't remember a lot about it. But yeah, it's. It's definitely a problem that somebody's gonna have to figure out in the near future.

[John Wilson]

I'm gonna have to figure it out. Okay. Going from one to 2,000 homes a year and that's going to take some PMs. Maybe we're thinking about purchasing. What. What does the other office staff look like? What, like, who's on the team?

[Kelly Roberts]

So we have 48 employees at Moss Heating Cooling. And so we have three people in the call center. A call center manager, service manager, three techs, three design techs. Now four to five PMs. And as somebody who handles all of our new construction bidding, just one person does that. And then install manager, sales manager. That's a. The install manager is the sales manager. Three US Salesmen. So comfort advisors, we don't do a selling tech model. We do a comfort advisor model. And A install coordinator. That's about it.

[Garrett Moss]

So what. What are the comfort advisors doing? Are those mainly for the Home Depot calls or, excuse me, Lowe's calls, or are those going to the new construction work?

[Kelly Roberts]

Nope, they don't have anything to do with new construction. So we were in three separate departments. So, like, if you were to look at our P and L, you'd see three separate departments, three separate general ledger coatings. And so each department has their own budgets, their own responsibilities for what they want to hit. So change out. They. We do, you know, we do all the other crap that doesn't work. Paper leads, Angie's, you know, all that stuff. I just recently implemented service scalers, because, John, you said to do that, so I'm doing it. I'll tell you how it works out.

[John Wilson]

Okay?

[Kelly Roberts]

You know, so they run those types of leads. They run tech leads, leads. We try to feed them with a. You know, we do modernize. We try to feed them with as many leads as possible. Some of those are really great, and some of them are a massive waste of money. So they are just responsible when somebody calls, and once they're heating and air conditioning system replaced, that's who goes and gives them options. We, you know, we've thought about the selling tech idea. We just haven't gotten there yet. We haven't found the right people. I think, yeah, I think that's such a unique person because I think that in my, you know, my brain and a lot of people's brain, you know, techs are. Or text are people who want to fix stuff. They don't want to talk to people. And so trying to find somebody who is both good at fixing stuff and talking to people has proved to be a challenge for.

[John Wilson]

You know, this is just like an aside. I. Something that's been kind of interesting over the past and. And it. It genuinely sort of breaks my brain. I. I think it's because we've gotten better at doing things. But maybe, maybe not. I have no idea. But like, the Angie's List of the world, the modernized, like, lead aggregators, they have been, like, really winning for us. And maybe it's we're just doing more H Vac or. I don't know.

[Garrett Moss]

But, like, I think it's.

[John Wilson]

I know we did a ton of work on our rehash. I know we did a ton of work on our speed to lead process, but, like, other people are doing that too, so I'm not sure why it's suddenly working for us. But. But, like, it's amazing. Like, we're getting a better return on investment from Angie's than LSA right now? No, I mean, I just think it's. Lead aggregators have always been like a thing, like a challenging thing. And yeah, I mean, you're, you're on. On one hand, I think, like, yes, that makes sense. And on the other, LSA has been a real challenge for the industry for like a year and a half or two years now. And I'm like, wouldn't that mean that everybody moved over to Lead X?

[Garrett Moss]

Well, everyone moved over to lsa and that's what made it hard. Hard is competition got so fierce and so now you're moving back to Angie's to get away from the fierce competition.

[John Wilson]

I gotta stop talking about it here. Kelly, how are you thinking about Angie's doesn't work.

[Garrett Moss]

Don't do it.

[Kelly Roberts]

Don't do it.

[John Wilson]

Do not do it.

[Garrett Moss]

Kelly, how are you thinking. Do you have any thoughts on like, in person style marketing in Legion? So, I mean, with the Moss name, it sounds like it would be a great opportunity. You have a ton of, of quote unquote street cred in, in dfw. So have you ever considered moving towards a in person, I guess, in person Legion. John, what do you call it? You have a specific name for it that, that makes more sense than me trying to explain this.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, we call it field marketing. But like, I think in this case it would be like, like home shows.

[Kelly Roberts]

You know, we don't, we haven't. I, I used to do home shows when I was with Crawford and we haven't done the home shows yet. You know, one thing that we're trying to do is partner with real estate brokers that we know. So this is kind of a new thing for us. So we had a couple of friends that had big brokerages, you know, hundreds of agents in their brokerage. And so we've gone and sponsored things for those guys and got up in front of them and talked. So kind of, you know, just trying to get them familiar with us. So when they do have. Because every single one of those realtors knows some guy driving around in a truck and he. They've been calling him for 10 years. And so our idea is, hey, when the guy in the truck doesn't answer the phone, just call us. And this kind of opens us up to, to all of their clients. So that's something that we're trying right now. We just like, literally, this is a brand new thing of all the things that we've done. I will tell you that marketing has been the Absolute, hardest, worst. Oh, yeah, just marketing. We, we can't figure it out, to be perfectly honest. You know, last year we, we. We went big. We did a commercial. We advertised on a local radio station. We didn't get anything out of it. I mean, I don't. I can't go back to Service Titan and look at a single person that called in and mentioned that they saw us on a commercial. So anybody thinking about doing a commercial, don't. Unless you're just this, like, made, you know, huge big box company and you can afford it, like, just don't do it. It's a trap. But, you know, so we're now we're trying to figure out, like, things like service scalers because we never did Google Ads. We never really. You know, this is really just a kind of a. You know, me and Garrett are really kind of just construction people trying to figure out how to make a heating and air conditioning company run. And, you know, so we're, we're figuring out the marketing thing. But I'll tell you, that's been the hardest thing for us to figure out. I mean, we've done magazines, we've done all kinds of stuff.

[John Wilson]

So you've got a lot going on. I mean, you've got, like, some real players. You know, you've got Baker, and you have Milestone and abc. Am I remembering that one right?

[Kelly Roberts]

Number one, Aaron?

[John Wilson]

Probably, yeah. There's just a lot going on. But, you know, we. I was. When I was down there last August, we just visited with some friends, so I visited Jimmy at Baker and I visited Josh with Rescue. And everyone's struggling with leads down there. I mean, it was like a. It was like a bloodbath is the way they were describing it. Like tens of millions of dollars of revenue down, down. Because they couldn't get the leads. So I really like being in the market. Yeah. I mean, being in the market that you're in, I. I'm kind of into what you're doing because they're just not pursuing it. So, like, they're not going after the 20. I mean, maybe they are, but they're not, like, chasing down those 27 low stores. And they're not, I don't know. Whereas, like, everyone in the world is trying to drive more leads through Google Ellison. So I really feel like you've got a unique advantage here.

[Kelly Roberts]

I hope so. You know, the other thing that we've had to realize, though, is that we may just not be able to, you know, while we've really grown new construction organically, we're just we don't think that we're going to be able to do that on the service and change outside. And so we are actively considering acquiring other companies. We're looking at a company right now because the, you know, DFW is a great place to be, but as a heating and air conditioning contractor it's a very tough place to be because you do, you have the big three big five air conditioning companies that have so much, much of the market and can just spend so much money on marketing that you really can't touch them as far as brand recognition goes. And then you've got 3,000 other people who are just can, you know, kind of undercut you on price. So it's an extremely competitive market. So the way that we have kind of gotten to now is we're going to have to find successful service and change out companies and hopefully maybe acquire one a year until we really have the service change out business that we're looking for.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, and, and the market is just huge too. So I mean there are very few markets in the US that have multiple over 100 million dollar operations and DFW is one of them. Like it's just a, you know, that's crazy. There's like two other cities that I can think of that have that. Yeah.

[Kelly Roberts]

And they're massive, like Milestone and number one Air.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, they're huge. And Baker's huge. I thought Baker was like 65, but they're 130. And I'm like that's crazy.

[Kelly Roberts]

That is crazy. You know, it's funny, we see that on the new construction side in this market too. I mean there are multiple new construction, residential, new construction companies that are over 100 million too. So not just the residential change out service guys, but the new construction guys are really big too.

[John Wilson]

Well, this, this was awesome. I think what I want to do is sort of our like closeout question. Here is somebody else out there is like, man, how do I work my way through and end up being the CEO and CFO of, of a startup home service company? What advice can you give for, for folks you've had an amazing career? Like how do they get where you're at?

[Kelly Roberts]

I think a few things. One of the things that I think is when you see a problem, raise your hand and volunteer to solve it. I think that, that the thing that I really struggle with people is that I have to think through things for them. If you can figure out how to think through problems, people will continually promote you, period. If you can do the heavy thinking for them, you're getting promoted. I always said yes to if somebody said, hey, can you handle this? Hey, can you take this on? Hey, will you do this? You know, hey, will you stay here till 8 o'clock tonight to figure this out? The answer was always yes for me. Yes, I'm willing to do that. And, you know, I had a good attitude about it. And, you know, I also also had a lot of motivation around it. You know, not only did I say yes, but yes, and I wanted to figure it out. And so I think that helped a lot. And just, I think especially for women, I think, you know, it's one of those things I think a lot of women get, like, just. Just kind of. They're meek and they don't want to raise their hand, and they don't want to be the person that's loud at the table or be the one that's direct. And I don't have any issues with being either one of those people. I will be direct. I will tell you what you're doing wrong, and I will say it to you enough times until you hear me and we correct it. I don't know if that's going to work for everybody. You know, one of those things where I just got really lucky. So we'll see.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, no, I think it probably will. I think that's awesome. And you also have your own show where you help talk about being a female leader in the trades. You want to talk about that show a little bit?

[Kelly Roberts]

Yeah. So we started Pressure Tested last year, and it was really funny because a few guys are in the office, wanted to start a podcast. And of course, I just raised my hand. I was like, well, you're not gonna, you know, invite me to be on your podcast? Like, how dare you. And I was like, okay, forget it. Y'all have your own podcast. But I want to take it over once a week and talk to women in construction. And they were like, okay, whatever. And their. Their podcast just never really got off the ground. They couldn't all kind of decide on a. On a. On what they wanted out of it. And in the meantime, I just started recording. And then all of a sudden I had, you know, nine episodes recorded. And I was like, well, well, let's release them. Let's see what happens. And we did. And, you know, we have 10 episodes scheduled over the next three months. And I've just found the coolest women. You know, really selfishly, it was about finding women that I wanted in my own network. I wanted to sit with really smart, powerful, women. And that's exactly what I've been able to do. And it and people have, you know, attracted to it and they really like it. So it's pretty cool.

[John Wilson]

Well, Kelly, thanks for coming on today. This was awesome. You've just had a heck of a journey and I appreciate you sharing it with us today.

[Kelly Roberts]

Thanks for having me on.

[John Wilson]

If people want to connect with you to just bug you and ask you questions about how to do this, how do they get a hold of you?

[Kelly Roberts]

Definitely LinkedIn.

[John Wilson]

Awesome. We'll provide that link, too. Thanks for coming on. If you like what you heard, check out owned and operated dot com.