← Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
#199 The $174M Remodel Company No One Saw Coming
00:55:18
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- [00:00]
A
We demoed at 91%. We closed at 82%.
- [00:04]
B
Whoa.
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A
For $557,000 our first month, our average.
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B
Project was like $11,700. That was wet and dry.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And we're up over 18,000.
- [00:13]
A
We were the only company in home improvement history to ever do 15 million in their first year. We were the only company to ever do 100 million in their first two years.
- [00:22]
B
My opinion, you're not running your business. Your business is running you. Hope is not a strategy. So you need to know everything about how your business converts, because then you have a business plan. Foreign.
- [00:36]
C
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today on the show, I have AJ And Noah from Premier Home Pros. Welcome to the show.
- [00:44]
A
Thanks for having us.
- [00:45]
B
Thanks for having us.
- [00:46]
C
This is going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. I mentioned to a couple friends, I was like, hey, this morning, I'm having a bath company on that went from like, zero to almost 200 in a couple years. And everyone immediately knew. And these are people all over the country. They're like, oh, yes, Premiere Home Pros. Here's what I would like you to ask them. It was kind of funny. I feel like you guys have done a good job distributing the message on LinkedIn of what you guys are doing. Owned and Operated is proudly sponsored by supplyhouse.com running a home service business is tough. I'm in the grind every single day in my plumbing and heating business. What I look for is ways to make my life a little bit easier, and supplyhouse.com helps with that. Supplyhouse.com has over a quarter million parts from all the brands that you and your team are going to love, and all those parts are in stock and ready to roll. So you can schedule your next job with confidence. Supplyhouse.com can also help you boost your bottom line with their free to join trademaster program. Over 100,000 professionals trust the Trademaster program every single day. For free shipping, free returns, and discounts on the stuff that they buy, use promo code SH4.5 for 5% off your first order. That's supplyhouse.com promo code SH5. And that code is valid through September 30, 2025. But I'd love to. I'd love to spend a couple minutes and dive into, like, what the heck is Premier Home Pros? And a little bit of the background. What do we do? And. And what's it look like now? So, AJ Walk us through it.
- [02:16]
A
Me and Noah became friends in 2018. We worked for a previous home remodeling company. Windonation. Noah came in as a salesperson working in the office with me. We gained a pretty good friendship that migrated over into a new company. We went and worked at Lee Filter for a number of years, and our friendship just continued to strengthen at that point. So we both had that kind of burning entrepreneur itch. Like, hey, like, there's a greater calling. Like, let's do something bigger. Let's do something together where, you know, we're kind of the narrators of our own story. So in 2022 is when Premiere kind of started. It really started nothing more than literally at like a dining room table. We were like, what do we want to do? What kind of product do we want to get into? It was me, him, my wife, and say, you know what? Let's. Let's do bathrooms. So let's try bathrooms. We were looking at the qualified remodeler list, and we're like, you know, roofing's very, very clouded. There's a ton of window companies in northeast Ohio.
- [03:11]
C
Clouded being like, there's a lot.
- [03:12]
A
There's just so many companies that are doing roofing, you know, and then. Then the segment of a lot of it is ins, insurance claims, and.
- [03:18]
C
Yes. Yeah.
- [03:18]
A
So we were like, bathroom is a carve out that I think that we have a real opportunity to grow and scale this business in because we always had the bigger picture of Premier is not always going to be a Northeast Ohio company. It's going to. Yeah, it's going to grow across the country. At least what our dreams were come from where we came. So in 2022, December, we ran our first lead. Yeah, I had a background running bathrooms working at Erie. You know, back in the 2012-14 range, Erie ran bathrooms. Now they're a metal roof company, but they were at that time, they did everything. They do windows that.
- [03:50]
C
Like Erie roofing. Yeah. Okay.
- [03:51]
A
Okay. They were Erie construction at the time, before they branded the Erie metal roofing.
- [03:55]
C
Yeah.
- [03:55]
A
So I had enough background in bathrooms to be dangerous. And, you know, I took a sales system that I wrote back in 2018 and I said, let's. Let's implement this in the bathrooms. And then me and. Me and Noah really kind of built out this model of like, from A to Z, what it was going to look like. And a lot of it was on the fly. So 2022, December, we're in our first lead. We went to Cortland, Ohio, Youngstown. I literally turned on a home advisor program on a Thursday. On Monday, we had our first lead. Me and Emma in the car together. We're driving up there. He's like, what do you think this is going to be like? I said, honestly, I think we're going to slam dunk this.
- [04:30]
C
Yeah.
- [04:30]
A
But I didn't think about what was going to happen after we sold it. Like, if we sold it, like, where does it go from there? Like, who's installing it? What are we doing with the aftercare part of this? Right? So we get up there, and it's exactly as we envisioned. Like, we sat with this lovely couple, we hammer them down. We sell for, like, $11,300. We get in the car, and I go, so, Noah, what do you think? And he goes, I think we can do this. So we're in a car driving home, and then, you know, then. Then we're taking another guy that is still with our company today, John Hopkins. And I said, listen, it's going to be us three this month. Let's just turn on the leads.
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C
Yeah.
- [05:05]
A
Let's knock it out the park. In December, the month of Christmas, we demoed at 91%. We closed at 82%.
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C
Whoa.
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A
For 557,000 our first month. Now, all those sales kind of came in in the first month.
- [05:20]
C
I want to hit that for. I want to double click on that for a sec. Because that's. That's crazy. I mean, just the demo rate alone.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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C
Is that exclusive to remodeling? Because it's a high interest.
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A
Extremely high.
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C
Yeah. That's crazy. Like, our demo rate's like 40%, which is considered best in class for our industry.
- [05:35]
A
Our. Our demo rate presently today hovers between 77 and 80%.
- [05:39]
C
That's crazy, too.
- [05:40]
A
But it was. It was the elite mindset of being hungry. You know, it was. It was a three people that were running leads. Something fresh we were rejuvenated of, you know, going from working corporate America to doing this. And the mindset was everything, right? So we were like, we're going to demo every opportunity we get, and we're going to close every one of them. So we ended with 50-557,000. And then I was like, this Noah, figure out how to install it, man. And he's like, install it? Like, I don't know anything about installation. I said, that's where you're gonna have to, like, you're gonna have to blend a little bit. So he's like, we're sitting in this room in our new office in North Canton, and he's. He's sourcing, trying to find a project manager. And we had this Guy kind of an, you know, an intern project manager. And we're sourcing installers and at the time we're sourcing products from all these different places. So then I kind of fast forward and we get to April and this guy comes in our office and I'm actually not there that day. Noah's there, this guy named Jake Amron comes in his office and he says, hey, you know, I just figured I'd stop by. I was making my runs today. I'm from Trumbull, Trumbull Industries in Kingstown. And I know you guys do bathrooms, so I figured I'd stop in and see if you guys need anything from product wise. So him and Noah started talking. The guy goes, well, we actually offer this wall system and I, I think that you guys would love this wall system if you've seen it.
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C
Sterling wall type thing.
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A
No. So we were presently selling in our first four months of existence acrylic.
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C
Yeah.
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A
You know, high definition plastic, right?
- [07:06]
C
Yep.
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A
We were selling it fine. But this guy comes in and shows us this, this, this manufactured stone product, which is just unbelievable. Unbelievable. Okay, so Noah's first question always is, how much, how much is it going to cost us? Right. Well, you know, it's going to be 40, probably more than acrylic and like turn you off like real quick, right? So he follows back up a couple days later. He's like, just come out to Youngstown. Just, just come out, see our facility, sit down with the owner team and see if there's a fit for you.
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C
Do they control the manufacturing of this product?
- [07:41]
A
Yes.
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C
Okay. Okay. So this is a white label product through Trumble.
- [07:45]
A
Correct.
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C
Understood.
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A
So we didn't realize that, I'll say it just like this, we didn't realize that like God's blessing was in the next door. Like we met this company, we go to this place and everything just kind of fits like a glove. We, we, we walk in there and we meet the vp, the owner and Jake and we start talking about this product. And I'm like, I'm wowed by this product. Oh yeah, we gotta make this product work. And at the time the price of materials was a lot more. So come to find out as we fast forward, you know, they're the manufacturer of our doors, of our bases, of our walls, of everything.
- [08:16]
C
Interesting, interesting.
- [08:18]
A
One company, one stop, seamless transition there, right? So we, we're sitting in this room and towards the end of the conversation and I tell Chick, which was their vp, I said, I want you to realize something that the, the team that you had here today is going to be your biggest client you ever had, ever. And he's like, well, we heard that before. You know, we heard it. I said, I'm telling you, you don't understand the people that are sitting in front of you. Like when we capitalize and commit to something, we're going to be your best client. We fast forward six months from that day. We're the largest client in the country for. So it's been a great relationship through, through, you know, Premier's evolvement. And as we've continued to mature. So we fast forward that. We finished that year at 15 million.
- [09:00]
C
And so for year one four. Year one million.
- [09:02]
A
Yeah.
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C
Gross sales.
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A
And that's three offices. That's Cleveland, northeast Ohio, Pittsburgh, in Philadelphia.
- [09:11]
C
What is. And we'll dive more into this later. But what's inside an office?
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A
So you have a sales manager, what we would consider an operations manager because he's kind of in control of the office and all the day to day operations.
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C
But like his, he's driven to be like a. He's a vibes sales manager.
- [09:28]
A
He's your sales manager. Right. He's your leader of your office. And you have a project manager. He's the guy that runs the crews, the scheduling, the installation, the aftercare, the product, all those things. You have a service manager and you have a sales team and a team of installers.
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C
Okay.
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A
And that's your, that's your, that's your model that you have. And from there you build on that. Right? So we fast forward through that year. We do $15 million. Noah stood up in front of at the end of our award ceremony and he said, I think that in 2024, we're going to shoot for 50. We're gonna shoot for 50 million. If I backtrack that, two months before that award ceremony, me and him sat down and we were talking and we're like, listen, we're two intelligent minds, but we can only take this business so far because at the end of the day, we don't know enough about marketing to take it to the stratosphere where we want to go. Yeah, we need to find somebody that knows the business, that knows the marketing business. So as I'm thinking and I'm going through my LinkedIn and I'm going through my network, of all the people I know in 16 years, I said, I got somebody. I know somebody. He worked at Leaffilter. He was the SVP of Leaffilter, senior vice president of marketing. And I was aware that he moved on from Leaf Like a year or two before I left. But I didn't know where he was at in his career. And at the time, the way that we left Leaf and moved to something different, I knew if I reached out to him, that was the first thing would come to mind. He'd be like, ah, you know, I'm sure you guys are doing great, but God, I remember what happened when you left Leaf. It just didn't end well, right? So I didn't think it was. He would know who I was. I wasn't sure he would know who Noah was. So I said, no, reach out to him. Just reach out to him. So Noah turns on the sales mode and puts on the hat and he goes, listen, hey, you know, my name is Noah. You know, we got this unbelievable company, Premiere Home Pros. We're going to do $50 million this year. We think we can supercharge this business to great heights. We need somebody like you. And he goes, I appreciate you reaching out. It's a great opportunity. You guys are doing unbelievable things. But I think at this stage of my career, it'd be a huge step back. I moved on from Leaf. I'm now the CMO at ars and I got kind of a cookie cutter job, but it's way collar and I don't really want to shake things up of what I've been chasing for so long, but I'd be interested in talking. And Noah said, just have coffee with us, just have coffee with us. We sat there at this coffee table and it was a book of ours, of our Trumbull samples. And it was me and Vince crammed in a seat together like this. And Noah crossed the table and I'm.
- [11:55]
B
A big guy, so I had to sit.
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C
I had to sit.
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A
We had this unbelievable, this unbelievable conversation. Really an unbelievable conversation. And we left that conversation like, ah, I don't know what's going to come of that, but yeah, but it gave us some more insight of kind of where, the template of where to avenue from there, right? Within two hours, he calls, calls Noah three ways me. And he said, guys, when I left that day or two hours ago, I literally ran home to my wife and said, I got the itch. Like, I gotta be part of this. Like I, I can't miss this opportunity. And I know it sounds crazy, Amanda, but I have to leave when I'm at. And I want to go work with these guys now. When we first reached out to Vince, we wanted Vince to work for us as an employee, not with us. Right. Because we didn't really see the vision at that point of, like, how we would make it all fit. Ended up being in that. It worked out better. He came in as a third owner, you know.
- [12:49]
C
Yeah.
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A
So we fast forward through 2024. Can we do $86 million?
- [12:55]
C
Yeah.
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A
And we opened six more additional locations.
- [12:58]
C
Yeah.
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A
So now we're at nine at the end of 2024. And here we are presently chasing 174 million this year.
- [13:05]
C
When you're sitting down, when you're like working through original product mapping, can you. I guess we should even talk about what the service is first.
- [13:13]
B
So we do full service bathroom remodeling in as little as one day. Bathtub shower replacements, walk in tubs, aging in place products. We will do flooring, we will do vanities. We will do toilets on kind of a pull and replace model. But the bread and butter of our business is, you know, bath and shower replacements.
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C
What is the average order value?
- [13:37]
B
$18,300 is our average contract. If you take. We delineate it into kind of two types of orders, a wet and a dry. So wet is always every.
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C
Every tub.
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A
Yep.
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B
Tub or shower. Right.
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C
Okay.
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B
And then the dry would be outside of the wet area. Floor, vanity, toilet, some combination that. That's almost $21,000. And then showers by themselves are almost $16,000.
- [14:03]
C
So the dry is 21 if they're combined.
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A
We're doing a shower and a vanity together.
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B
Wet and dry. Every job has at least a wet.
- [14:12]
C
Okay, what is the smallest? You guys mentioned something like your first sale was 11. Is that like a. The smallest hook?
- [14:19]
A
Well, the average sale has went up throughout the years.
- [14:21]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think what I'm. What I want to get to is like, well, what, what is the service? What's the timeline?
- [14:28]
B
Sure.
- [14:28]
C
But also like, I think what makes this fascinating is probably the SKU count seems pretty tight.
- [14:34]
B
We try to keep it as.
- [14:35]
A
As.
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B
As tight as possible. We, we do kind of pride ourselves on bringing a very customizable and almost a la carte process to the home. Yeah. You know, you know, as a business, you have a lot more SKUs than we have, but you want to keep your SKUs as tight as you reason reasonably can while still keeping your customers happy. So, yeah, we offer 14 different wall systems. It's two, seven different colors, two different patterns, essentially.
- [15:00]
C
Yes.
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B
You know, four different bases and a handful of doors. And just let the customer kind of pick and choose their finishes and match it all together, almost like a bespoke model where they choose what they want.
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C
And that's like 20, 30 combos. Sounds like.
- [15:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, give or take, you know, in terms of order value over the years. And we're in our third year now. We're starting our 29th month in existence. And in May, it's gone up considerably. Inconsistent. Consistently as grown, some of it is growing into more expensive markets or markets that have a higher cost basis for anything that you would buy in Philadelphia versus Northeast Ohio.
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A
Right.
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C
Yeah.
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B
But then also, you know, we had a cost bump when we switched from acrylic when we started to our engineered stone product now considerably.
- [15:44]
C
Yeah.
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B
And that was a calculated bet that we would have a higher average order value. And that was 100% correct.
- [15:51]
C
Yeah.
- [15:52]
B
But, yeah, it's. It's. It's gone up considerably. When we first started, our first year, our average project was like $11,700. That was wet and dry combined, like, everything, total.
- [16:01]
C
Yeah.
- [16:01]
B
And we're up over 18,000 now. We're able to offer a few more higher quality things to our customers that they absolutely love. But we're also getting better at being able to find some of the really finer things that customers.
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A
But talk about that, like, don't leave that part out. Talk about the first year of, like, how we did everything, and now we've streamlined this. We have a higher ticket average sales price now. Yeah.
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C
I think that's what makes it scalable. I mean, it's the, like the low SKU count. Like, that's my dream. I've just joked that, like, my dream scenario is all I do nationwide is install water heaters.
- [16:33]
B
Sure.
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C
Because that's like six SKUs. Yeah, I would love to. I'd love to hear about that.
- [16:37]
B
When we first started, we would sell anything and. And everything.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Okay. We had installers to do it. Right.
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C
Like, we're not so, like, siding, like.
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B
Oh, no, no, no. Within the bathroom.
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C
Okay. How far did we go?
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B
Yeah. Knocking out walls, widening doorways, moving plumbing. Really?
- [16:51]
C
A construction company.
- [16:53]
B
Yeah.
- [16:53]
C
At that point, a little too much. Right.
- [16:55]
B
And we. We did it. Well, we did it right. We had the right people to install it. You can't sell something you can't do. Right. So we always kind of focused on that, making sure that we could actually enact on the things that we promised homeowners. But as we got to the end of 2021 across three or 2023 across three offices, and we said, a little more complicated than a scalable model is going to allow for. We need to chill out on this. So no more moving toilets, no more busting out walls left and right and moving plumbing and vanities and all. And all this jazz and building walls. No more of that. Let's turn into a pull and replace company and get our SKUs down, but also get our labor items down as well, so our installers aren't trapped at a job for seven days, not making enough money. We got to make sure these guys can. Can feed their families and can turn jobs. So we've got really, really good at not just marketing for the things that we want to do. A more pull and replace model, which is really what we've started. I don't want to ever say master. We've started to get very good at that. Yeah. We really simplified things that we won't do anymore as well.
- [17:56]
C
Said no.
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A
A lot more.
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B
Said no to our sales team.
- [17:59]
A
And you know those houses in northeast Ohio and the Cleveland area that have the old 60s pink tile wrapping around the border of the walls that's going into the tub? We used to tear all that out. I mean, we would tear all that border tile out and replace the drywall. And, you know, you think about dryer replacement and sand and mudding and finishing. You're there three days and. Yeah. And then just.
- [18:19]
C
So that's how we. We used to do bathroom models. This was forever.
- [18:22]
B
Sure.
- [18:22]
A
Yeah.
- [18:23]
C
So when I bought the business, we were like a million total dollars of revenue, and we were doing bathroom models, and there's these $35,000, $40,000, like, bespoke bathrooms, and every single one would take, like, three to four weeks. Yeah. So. And I got out of it as fast as I could because it was like. It's crazy.
- [18:42]
A
You're so bogged down.
- [18:43]
C
Yeah, you're bogged down. It. It doesn't make any sense. And margin was terrible, so we've sort of avoided baths. But, like, this makes a lot more sense to me.
- [18:52]
B
Yeah.
- [18:53]
A
You know, bathrooms and kitchens are those projects that people spend a lot of time in those rooms, and they look at every single fine issue that you could find inside the bathroom. They go, oh, that trim doesn't look perfect. Or, you know.
- [19:05]
C
Yeah.
- [19:05]
A
So we were like, it's almost impossible to perfect this.
- [19:08]
C
Yeah.
- [19:08]
A
And execute it to where the customer is always happy. So we just have refined the process and just made the process a lot more streamlined so it's easier to.
- [19:16]
B
I like to say that we commonly. We've built the airplane while. While it's in the. In the air.
- [19:21]
C
Yeah.
- [19:22]
B
Right. So when.
- [19:24]
C
When you did that, the transition maybe like, saying, no, I don't know. If it was like a merge stop or like, you know, over a couple months. But I would assume the first concern was like, what happens with closing rate? So, like, what did happen with closing rate?
- [19:39]
B
Number one, more jobs. The question isn't when you say no to a customer, you know, are they all going to say no? The question is when you say no to a customer, which that's not really our bread and butter. A customer really appreciates that. The question is how many of those customers are still going to say yes to what you can offer?
- [20:00]
C
Yeah.
- [20:01]
B
And we found a very large portion of them still say yes. And look, at the end of the day, the customers that don't want to hire us because they want more of a full service model and a really complex build, we're probably not the right company for that. We're probably not. You know, everybody is good at what they're good at and we know what we're not and what we shouldn't be. And for us, it was the closing percentage went down a couple percent. But that just accelerated our cash turn because I don't think we would ever say we don't have enough business. This is almost an insatiable market if you do it the right way. And we just found ourselves into more of the jobs that we wanted that served us right, served our customers right, but ultimately accelerated our cash turn at the same time. Because we're not stuck in homes for seven days or we're not having too big of a backlog. We're right in the meat and potatoes of what we want to do.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Accelerating that.
- [20:53]
C
Yeah.
- [20:53]
A
We were able to scale down the expectations with the customer recenter the focus on what was really important to them. And most of the time is the shower. And then really train the sales team in the transition of how to communicate it properly.
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C
Yeah.
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A
So that the customers are okay with those expectations. Like, let's not gripe about the 5% of the bathroom that we can't do. Let's talk about the 95% of the bathroom that we can do.
- [21:15]
C
Yeah.
- [21:16]
A
And we found ourselves as we went from like a 57 close down to of 53, and we were doing way more revenue.
- [21:23]
C
Yeah.
- [21:23]
A
And our installers were happy because they were making more money because they were getting into four or five jobs a week versus two. You know, so it was like ended up being a really, I would say a win win across the board in every aspect that we could check a box next to.
- [21:35]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. So limited the SKU counts, limited the Amount of products we're going to place. And you guys, you guys are sort of the. What's the opposite of a mullet? But you guys are like party up front, business in the back. Right? So like. Yeah. Bangs. I don't know.
- [21:55]
B
I think it's what. I think it's what the teenagers have today with their curly hair.
- [21:59]
C
Yeah, yeah. They can't say you guys got what I was putting. Yeah, but, but sales and marketing and we're finding partner companies to install our products. Yeah, yeah. So what's it look like finding and sourcing vendors in like Pittsburgh, like you guys are here, Akron, like, what did that look like?
- [22:16]
A
It's went through phases of growth. Obviously every department has broadened dramatically. Right. Our recruiting team now is a broad team. In the beginning, it was just my wife. She was the one person recruiting for the entire country that we had. It's really just going to the market, posting the ads on. Indeed. And all your. All your hiring platforms, vetting those calls up front. Hey, listen, do you have tools? Do you have a trailer? Do you have a truck? Do you have reliable transportation? Do you have workers comp and liability insurance? Yes. Great. Schedule you for an interview. Right. Project manager. Field those interviews and filters out. And I would say no market has been challenging. Like, no market has been overly challenging. Find installers because Premier pays well. We pay well. We believe that we would pay. We would rather pay great on our sales team and pay great to our installers and we'll figure the other stuff out in the back to continue to be a profitable business, which we are. But when you pay talent, talent stays. Right. That's just what it comes down to. And when you're dealing with bathrooms and you're dealing with the intricacies of what the liability and risk of a bathroom can be, you better have good people installing it. So him saying, we simplified SKUs, we got into more systems, we've created processes with how we install, which products we offer, what kind of sealants we're using, what all the different options on doors and niches and shelves. Just refine that so that we don't have a million different ways to skin the cat. Let's just, let's make it one or two different ways and it's a lot easier just picking colors and changing the color. So I would say as far as getting the labor has not been difficult. We start every market with, like I told you, an operations manager that controls the sales team, project manager, which controls the install team, and then recruiting goes to work. We fill and we build, we build around that. We got a sales leader and an install leader and we build around that. And there's a work through process where you're filtering out if the salesperson's the right fit as they go through training. Each one of those departments go through a strenuous training. We put them through a complete premier sales product training, complete sales process training. And then the same thing with install, they go through an install training. We need to know, I've been doing this for 20 years. That's great. Let's see you install the product. Let's see you take the product and install it. Making sure we know you know how to move plumbing and you know how to mess with a P trap and change the valve and do all the things that people say they can do. Let's make sure you know how to do that before we send you out. We have a field trainer that takes these installers out for the first week and they shadow.
- [24:38]
C
Yeah.
- [24:39]
A
And then each day of the install we start to kind of pull the shell back a little bit and say now you do this step, let's watch you do it, you know, before we kick them loose. So we know that by the end of that week that we've taken these people out, they're ready to go, that we know they can do the job.
- [24:53]
B
And how, how, how we've kind of structured our business because when you ask, you know, how do you find installers and stuff, it's, we know it's a process to find the right, a collection of the right installers. Right. So going back to the genesis of this company, we started the company with no debt. We still have no debt to today we're cash flow positive, fully profitable and we haven't taken $1 a debt and, and we built this P L from the beginning to be almost 70% variable. So if we don't sell a job, we don't have any costs other than employees and some marketing costs that are recurring. We're going to sell jobs. Right. So it allows us, when we greenfield a location, a lot of companies are doing M and A and they're taking out debt, buying other companies, systems, processes and kind of trying to merge them into a platform and make them all one for us. We have a 46 day payback period on any greenfield location on average. And the reason why is because our, our PNL is basically fully variable and we're not out a ton of investment over time because the market starts cash flowing very quickly and so it allows us to buy time to find the right installer base. It allows us to find the first two good installers, really work with them, get another one in there and over time build the right collection of people so that when we can accelerate the marketing, when it really starts to dive in 90, 120, 180 days out, we have the installer base, we have the sales base, and we're ready to just.
- [26:15]
C
Start moving business inside the 70%. This variable. What's the 30? That's not like base comps, DNA marketing. Yeah.
- [26:23]
B
Two things, right?
- [26:24]
C
Yeah, yeah. And variable. Are we counting cogs in variable?
- [26:28]
B
No.
- [26:29]
C
Okay. So that's like variable opex.
- [26:31]
B
That's interesting because cogs only happen when the job actually gets installed.
- [26:36]
C
Right, right, right, right. So we, we drop in a new manager, we greenfield.
- [26:42]
B
Sure.
- [26:42]
C
48 day payback.
- [26:44]
B
46, 106.
- [26:45]
A
Yeah.
- [26:45]
C
That's wild. What is the dollar that it takes like a hundred thousand dollars to start a market? Yeah.
- [26:53]
B
For us, less than that. If you look at the totality of the cost, it's like $96,000. I haven't updated in the last 30 days, but it's typically right around a hundred thousand dollars to get a market started. But in terms of cash flow or cash out to cash in, it feels like much less than that almost immediately. Because what we end up doing is there's a premier way. We've coined this, this model of this is who we are. This is how we do business across, you know, 200, 300 people in this organization now. And we try to find the right people. We always say if you have the right person, you have the market. Right. And we've got marketing planned out for the next 30 markets where you have the zip codes that we want to attack and type of homeowners we want to go after. So we're looking for the right operations sales leader. Right. That can convert our spend into revenue. And once we find that person, we get them through training, we get the lease, they get into the market and they immediately. Three days before we actually want to start running leads. We buy the marketing, we buy the leads, they start coming in, call center starts qualifying them. Getting a schedule built together for a couple in house sales leaders to go out to the market with that new sales manager and start selling projects and generating revenue. At that point we have our sales trainer in house. That is this training the first team of sales reps to go out in the field in, you know, a week or two to join that sales manager. And then we just kind of get it started from there. So almost from Day one, when we're running leads inside of a market, we're starting to generate revenue. It's because we have the right leader to get out there and grow it from nothing.
- [28:20]
C
We have the system that plays a playbook too. FieldPulse is the all in one field management solution for growing home service companies. FieldPulse is designed to simplify your day to day operations by combining everything you need into one platform. It also includes integrations to help you save time like QuickBooks, desktop and online. It has a bunch of advanced tools and features like a CRM, estimates and invoicing, good, better best options, maintenance plans, a robust price book and scheduling dispatching. FieldPulse will transform the way that you manage your field team altogether. It will save you time and find revenue that you didn't even know existed. Whether you're a small company looking to grow or a larger company Looking to optimize, FieldPulse has the tools that you need to do it. And don't just take our word for it. FieldPulse has earned over 580 glowing reviews with an average rating of 4.8 stars. That's Field EU LSE. Head to their website to learn more. Fieldpulse.com something that's been really interesting is we're looking to greenfield. Our next spot is like industry standard, which I'm curious if it's the case with what you guys have seen. It probably is with roofing, but industry standard for greenfielding plumbing, H vac electric is I'm going to come in and I'm going to drop 80 grand a month of like branded spend.
- [29:39]
A
That's the difference.
- [29:40]
C
Yeah. I mean that's crazy. And then, so then it becomes this like race. You know, first off, you're already down $1 million. You know, I was talking to someone, I was talking to someone Monday and five location shop in Pennsylvania, 130 of revenue. So like that's, you know, that's a lot. And they're getting ready to greenfield their next spot and it's half a million dollars in the first 90 days, all brand. And it sounds like that's not the place, like we're buying leads.
- [30:10]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [30:11]
C
Yeah.
- [30:11]
A
It's the best way to keep your com low.
- [30:13]
C
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [30:14]
A
I mean you're going to have, you're going to have to weed through a lot of fat. You know where, where you're paying for a branded lead that is calling you specifically your brand. They're calling you probably not shopping you and your conversion rate to convert that to an appointment, it's probably like 95%. Right. Unless you hear some kind of a red flag on the call that says we're not a good fit for you or we can't help you. That's such a high conversion rate where when you're dealing with affiliate marketing, you're, you're weeding through a lot of things that the customer's window shop and the customer thinks that, that we just do repairs, we're outside the work scope.
- [30:47]
C
So are you guys branding? I mean it sounds like you're buying the leads directly.
- [30:50]
A
We do both.
- [30:51]
C
Okay.
- [30:52]
A
The, the, the weight of percentage is much higher with affiliate marketing than it is with branded.
- [30:58]
C
You know, what does affiliate marketing mean to you?
- [31:00]
A
You know, you're, you're buying leads from like, you know, like Angie's list.
- [31:03]
C
Yeah, I've never heard that called an affiliate marketing.
- [31:06]
A
And affiliate marketing can be a non branded lead or it can be a brand.
- [31:10]
C
Okay.
- [31:10]
A
Non branded lead is hey, I'm just interested in a bathroom and I just put my name in there and three or four companies call me and first one there probably wins the job. Right. You can close them on the spot. A branded lead is the affiliate marketer creates a campaign that has your logo on the lead, whether it's a social ad or a banner ad. And they're running it and saying this is premier. You know, we're advertising for a bathroom and people are clicking that and they're only, you're only getting their form. So it's, you're converting at that at a higher clip cost per lead on that is a lot more expensive than just buying it from pool, you know, but there's a place in time for each one of them. You know, we run a lot of non branded ads that, with affiliates that happen to be our best cost of marketing conversions, like you know, sub 15%. So yeah, so it's a, it's a great lead source. But yeah, there was definitely, I think it's way more difficult to scale a business going with brand leads. Oh yeah.
- [32:02]
B
It's just a longer time frame.
- [32:03]
C
Yes, well, it's a longer time frame and it's on the front. Inhibitively expensive.
- [32:09]
B
Our bet was always to buy the demand that exists while we work on generating demand through our brand.
- [32:14]
C
Yeah, and that's, that's, I think that's what makes sense to me too. I, I think and I, I'm wondering if it's a generational gap of like the folks that I'm seeing doing the branded spend tend to be like that worked 10 years ago. So that's how we're going to do this. But like, what's your funnel now for. For just buying leads. Because the leads are there. I mean, the leads are there for.
- [32:38]
B
Bathrooms, but you have to be able to convert.
- [32:39]
C
Like everybody needs a water heater. Yeah. And I, I think that's a problem in our industry. Like you guys don't have. I think it's kind of funny to compare industry sometimes because. And Vince probably has this perspective too from like dealing with plumbing and like our industry is so drunk on hot leads that they don't know what to do with an Angie's List should. Like, they don't even know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with like door knocking or like events because everyone's always expecting that bottom of the funnel. My toilet just broke. My furnace didn't turn on today. And I mean you can get pretty far. Like you can get to 20, 30 million dollars on emergent leads. High close rate. But no one has like, or very few people have that funnel dialed in on acquiring leads the way you guys have had to acquire leads since day one.
- [33:33]
B
Yeah. Your industry is. And Vince can speak to this a lot more, but it's a need industry more than a want. And ours is a. We have need. We definitely have a need. There's a lot of want. People will look at their pink tile bathroom and say, I want a new updated bathroom. So we're able to capitalize on that a little bit. It's a little bit of a different type of consumer process. But part of the, part of the thing with like the, the payback period kind of goes back on, on a greenfield of market. Kind of goes back to chasing branded or chasing like current demand with affiliates. Is part of the reason that he was so excited to come over to Premiere Home Pros and make it happen is because, I mean, he was the chief marketing officer at ars. That's a 2 billion dollar plumbing and H vac conglomerate.
- [34:15]
C
Right, right.
- [34:16]
B
I think they have 120 brands or 150 brands, something like that.
- [34:19]
C
Huge.
- [34:20]
B
So just a larger version of what you guys.
- [34:21]
C
Yeah, right.
- [34:22]
B
And he's like, it's a two year payback period because we have to get in at any time we open our markets. Two year payback period of millions of dollars because we have to get in there and saturate our brand.
- [34:31]
C
Yeah.
- [34:32]
B
And wait for the phone to start ringing at this time. You need trucks, you need just.
- [34:36]
A
They're almost all M and A though. And they're hovering at a 10 to 12% EBITDA.
- [34:40]
C
Yeah.
- [34:40]
A
So they're heavy and. But they also do affiliate marketing. Sure. They have a. There's, I think it's like about 20, 25% of their business.
- [34:46]
C
Yeah.
- [34:47]
A
Is affiliate marketing. So like I said, there's a place in time, but I think.
- [34:50]
C
No, I mean, 46 day payback is wild. Yeah. That's amazing.
- [34:53]
B
It's because there's real want generated or.
- [34:55]
C
Demand that that's a hell of a flywheel buying convert. Like. Yeah, that's incredible. Back to. I accidentally skipped this, but I'd love to understand it a little bit more. So like we're sitting at, we're either sitting at the kitchen table or we're at a, at a cafe. But we're setting the tone for what we're going to do. We're going to launch a bathroom model company.
- [35:16]
B
Yep.
- [35:18]
C
What was original vision like, is this original vision? Are we, are we surpassing where we thought we would be at this point? Like, I mean, because this is crazy from the outside looking at.
- [35:27]
B
We're dreamers.
- [35:28]
A
Number one being being 100% transparent and upfront. Like we dream big like from the get go. Like we came from two jobs working at lease making absurd amounts of money where most people would never leave that job. They would never even consider leaving the job. You know, when you're bringing in 600,000, a million dollars a year, you're not leaving that job. But it wasn't about the money. It was just about like I got to that point in my career where I knew I could serve better doing something different on my own. And he was in the same alignment where like this may end up epically failing or we're going to be like, we're going to transcend the industry. Right. One of the two things are happening here. It's either we're going bankrupt or we're going to be extremely successful. And I'll tell you, every time, I'll bet on myself. I'll bet on myself every time my back's against the corner. I believe I'll fight my way out. And he feels the same. So when we envision premiere.
- [36:27]
B
Yeah.
- [36:27]
A
We envision premier to be a national footprint from the get go. Now there was a lot of like stepping stones and like getting off the road and coming back on and there was multiple breakpoints. We're like, are we going to get through this?
- [36:38]
B
Lot of luck.
- [36:39]
A
You know, a lot of good things had to happen.
- [36:42]
C
And what were some of the breakpoints?
- [36:45]
A
It's a People element.
- [36:46]
C
Right.
- [36:46]
A
There's people element. And, and you know, people that you believe are loyal to you or that you are going to come through and do their part and you know, you're paying for their talent and they fail you. Or, or people leave you high and dry and you know, you're dependent on one person run a market, you're a leader and that person leaves. And now you get this gaping hole.
- [37:05]
C
Yeah.
- [37:05]
A
Or your sales team ends up depleted.
- [37:07]
B
Or marketing, Marketing come through.
- [37:09]
A
Yeah. Or marketing is failing in a market for a short period of time. Or, you know, installations just can't get up and run at the speed that you want them to get to. So there's. This is a human capital business, like I was asking in the hallway, like, is this an asset driven business or is this a human capital?
- [37:24]
C
Human. Yeah, we're in business and all day.
- [37:26]
A
You rely on people to deliver the message and execute for you. And, and that's part of it. Right. So when we sat down, our, our vision was, let's create this to be just a monstrosity. Let's create this to be something great and let's do something that no bathroom company's been able to do. There's plenty of other companies that have done this in other industries, in the home improvement industry, but maybe not bathrooms. Like, let's do this. And that was always the goal. So I would say yes to that. Answer that. When we sat down, when we pitched it to Vince, it wasn't, hey, we plan to be a $15 million company. No, we took it to zero to 15. We were the only company in home improvement history to ever do 15 million in their first year. We were the only company to ever do 100 million in their first two years. Let's continue that pace. Like, let's not stop there. Right.
- [38:15]
B
We don't begin with that end in mind. We try to set up systems and processes and people and put them in the right lane to do things. And then we just, we dream really big. It's almost like an irrational self belief. I don't know. But. And I, I told you this before we started or just I guess dumb enough to try it where it's not that we're irrational risk takers, where we, we take risks that we shouldn't take or anything like that. It's. We just always want to build it bigger and bigger and bigger and go and go and go and there's not a natural stop sign in our heads for this. And your business will tell you what you can or can't do. And you got to push. You got to push the limits, like, to get a little bit uncomfortable, and it'll tell you when it's time to kind of slow down a little bit and focus on quality. We could have done $120 million in sales last year. In 2024, we landed the plane at $86 million because it was the right thing to do for our customers and right thing to do for our infrastructure. But, you know, during that time, we bought ourselves time to build it up to do 170, 580 this year. So we didn't ever begin with any ends in mind. You know, when I got in front of the entire company at the end of 2023 to celebrate our successes in year one and he mentioned, I had said, hey, I think we're going to do 50 this year. We had modeled that out, but we didn't put a cap on it, and we found ourselves at 86. We didn't say, this is our business plan. Jan1 and this is what we're doing this year, and we're not deviating. It's like, no, this is a living, breathing ecosystem. You never stop acquiring talent. You never stop building around your talent, and then at the end of the day, it'll consistently tell you what you should or shouldn't do, and you need to listen to your business.
- [39:53]
A
And the unique thing is, is that I told you earlier that all the owners are very different. Right. Noah falls almost into the conservative category with a lot of things, like where he's like, oh, pause, timeout. Like, and me and Vince, like, pedal to the metal, baby. Like, we're going. Let's push this gas all the way down. Like, we're. We're driving this to the moon. He's like, slow it down. Let's slow. We're not ready for this. You know, so there's a good balance there, because that happens all the time. You know, where I'm like, dude, let's do 200 million this year. Oh, hold on. Let's. Let's sue for 150. Or the same thing with the 50. Like, let's shoot for 50. I'm like, I think we can do 100. You know, and.
- [40:28]
B
And then usually because of. We can't because of this, this. This all first. It's not just start to stop.
- [40:33]
C
Yeah.
- [40:34]
A
And we still end up getting there. But it's a good way to, like, re. Gear and look at it through a different lens and say, okay, what's the. What's the bumps in the road on the on the way there, right? But to go back to this premier story where we kind of found like, I guess I use the word like the unicorn of the business was that you have to have a couple of things that happen line to scale any business. The first one is, is you better have a documented, well trained sales process. Like it has to be to a T, A to Z, completely trained through and through your company. It's still, it's the living, breathing thing through your business, right? You have to then cultivate that in every other, every other division. Your call center has to have a script and they know how to do rebuttal training. There needs to be a process of how you, how you, you know, harness all the leads and where do they go and where they store. There needs to be a CRM that talks to, you know, an automation and everything needs to kind of funnel together. Right. But the biggest thing is, is you got to have a unique selling proposition. If you're not, if you're selling a product, for you to scale to the way that we wanted to scale, you had to have a unique selling proposition. A product that was unique, that's different from everybody else in your category. If we would have stayed in the acrylic world, we would still be successful. One, the margins wouldn't be there. Two, the average sale would never be there. And three, I believe our turnover insider infrastructure will be high because we're competing with a lot of companies that do the exact same thing. You can only do it so well. People are going to buy at that point. Your process, they're not buying your product. We wanted people to buy our product and our process was second. Right? Our process got us to the product, but the product is what makes us unique.
- [42:13]
C
So is this a lesson learned from Leaf? Because that feels like a portion of the LEAF strategy.
- [42:18]
A
It's been my process for 16 years. In every company I've ever worked at. Like when I look at every company I've ever worked at, that was three of the top five companies in the.
- [42:27]
C
Qualified remodeler and that owned their distribution.
- [42:30]
A
Have a unique product. Yeah, they have a unique product, right. So we were lucky enough with this product to find that to have to go with the state of the art selling system. And then we bring in this marketing coach who that can get the leads and it was like all those things gelled and then there was one missing element in the business. Finding the right install leader, finding a person that could take your company to the next level. And we happen to have deep networks and it was A person that I've worked with for going on 13 years that was at Leaf and, you know, was looking to grow in his, in his, in his career. He wanted to take the next step. So timing's everything too, right? Like, that's part of it is where are people at in their career? Are they willing to take a bet on you? Because that's what they're doing. They're taking a bet on us. We're, we're young, ambitious, and we were knowledgeable, but we don't have a brand. We're a young company. Right. At that stage, people are taking bets on you. And we were lucky enough to be able to tap into a network that I had for a long period of time in the sales industry that people took a bet on us and that's how these markets became great markets, was we had the right person. He made that, that saying to you. He said, if you have the right person in the market, that's what it starts with, having the right person. So we were lucky enough to have good people around us to build the business. That's where it starts, that end process.
- [43:46]
C
Yeah. There's. You said 200 people on the team. Is that inclusive of contractors? Like, yeah.
- [43:53]
B
And I think with, with 1099s, I think it's over 300 now.
- [43:56]
C
Yeah, yeah. What's the, what's the org chart like, look like?
- [44:03]
B
And what, what facet? I mean, you know, how many sales.
- [44:06]
C
How many frontline leaders?
- [44:09]
B
Yeah, so we've got like, you know, obviously head finance, head of install operations, head of marketing, head of call center, and then he heads up sales. And then we have several senior seasoned sales leaders that run regions, kind of manage managers, if that makes sense. And then, you know, we got managers in the call center. We got managers all along, you know, ordering and, and, and, and installation. And so it's.
- [44:39]
A
How many corporate employees inside the building?
- [44:41]
B
Over 600. No, almost 100 now with all the call center. Inside sales reps. Yeah.
- [44:46]
C
And inside sales reps for your industry. That's like an inbound lead and outbound lead. Like that's rehash.
- [44:51]
A
That's rehashes its own.
- [44:53]
B
Yeah, we had rehashing its own, like.
- [44:55]
C
Inside sales for you guys. Like, that's an Angie's List lead would go to inside sales.
- [44:58]
B
Yeah.
- [44:59]
C
Okay.
- [44:59]
B
Anybody that fills out a form or sees a commercial calls anything like that.
- [45:03]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [45:04]
B
And then we call and try to be the first person on the phone with them and get out there today, if not tomorrow.
- [45:09]
C
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm Imagining all the friction of growing an org chart that quickly. Obviously, people. But like, as we're thinking about growing leaders inside the organization, is that. Has that been the path? Like how much of it has been growth inside versus obviously. Clearly we talked about some really key, pivotal outside hires.
- [45:30]
B
I think we've defined your. Your top leaders. We had to go outside. Right. And then let them start cultivating people on the inside. Yeah, we're really starting to get to that pipeline where.
- [45:41]
C
Yeah.
- [45:41]
B
People know the premier way. They came up through the org. And we want to get to a culture where we only promote from within.
- [45:47]
C
Yeah.
- [45:48]
B
And we're almost basically there. But to start it from the genesis of it, you got to find the right person that's probably done it elsewhere and then.
- [45:55]
C
Yeah.
- [45:55]
B
And let them kind of start the systems processes in their department and then put people in there and let them work up underneath them. That's kind of been our model.
- [46:05]
C
Yeah, we've seen that for us too. Like heads of departments have come from outside.
- [46:09]
B
Sure.
- [46:10]
C
Some director from somewhere else that's been able to sort of convert their frontline leaders into. Into more. How large is a recruitment team? I just got to know that.
- [46:20]
A
Yeah, they're a team of five.
- [46:22]
C
Really.
- [46:23]
A
Five.
- [46:23]
C
That doesn't even seem like that much for the amount of hiring you guys are.
- [46:26]
A
They're. They're broken into divisions and markets, you know, so like region. Yeah, so like, you know, Audrey will take. She'll take the Midwest. She'll take Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Dayton. And with those, she'll handle all the facets of operation there. She'll handle the installers. Yeah, we don't circulate project managers. They stay where they're at. People are happy in their jobs. Same with service tech and field trainers. It's not a heavy circulation position. We're circulating a lot of installers constantly, constantly bringing more people in the door and sales people. So that's really your two areas of recruiting that you're spending a majority of your workflows on is those two areas.
- [47:02]
C
Yeah.
- [47:03]
A
And then the same thing with, you know, and then we just. If we add a reason, like if we go to Minnesota, which we're going to go this year, she'll take on that part of her region as well. And each one of those five people have. Have a region and a number of duties to do.
- [47:17]
B
So they'll set up interviews for the leaders that are going to interview those candidates for those positions and then they'll choose their person. So sifting through resumes, having an initial calls and setting up initial interviews and then they take it from there.
- [47:29]
C
Yeah. When you guys are in this current state, hopefully perpetual state of hypergrace, how much are. I mean, tracking gross margin and net margin has to be a moving target, I would assume. How are we dialed in on that? Or is that like we will take care of that in a year or two years and just trying to get better.
- [47:55]
B
I mean, we're always tracking it month by month. The really cool thing is been I don't know how we've done this or if it's different from other companies, but we've been able to calculate almost down to the dollar or down to the percent within a plus or minus a 2%, our conversion rates down to how, how it plays into net profit in the end.
- [48:17]
C
So we walk me through that, like 53%, 54%. Like what happens with.
- [48:23]
B
For us, our model starts with marketing, modeling out a market and then sending the zips that we will and will not buy leads in out to our marketing partners. They will tell us then how many leads that they can get us per month.
- [48:41]
A
Estimated.
- [48:42]
B
Estimated. And then from there we'll take all of our conversion metrics and we'll dial the business down to a net profit percentage at the end of the day and damn near land the plan every single time near it. So it's a constant moving target. We know what we've modeled this year to look like.
- [48:56]
C
Yeah.
- [48:56]
B
Last year we didn't try to make money. We ended up making money. We didn't try to. Because when you're in a green fielding six locations and you're not even within 24 months of opening, it's like you're not trying to make money, you're just trying not to lose it. We did that. We made some money. It's very, very happy to say that. It's almost hilarious that we did. But in this year is a year of doing it much more profitably. We are doing that now. We have a finance team and they model it out and we, we know our business inside out because we're not silent owners. We know the. The heartbeat of what's going on in every department and what we can and cannot enact on in terms of a business plan. And so we're able to model out month by month what the profit will be based on how we've built the P L cogs, all that good stuff, and then pretty much land pretty closely to it. So, yeah, so, yeah, yeah, I think you can say that we're pretty calculated with it. Yeah, you got to know your conversion metrics.
- [49:53]
A
The data gives us, gives us the answers, right, like the historical data.
- [49:56]
C
And you can rub like, do you run demo rate? Like, is demo rate pretty consistent?
- [50:02]
A
Yes.
- [50:03]
C
Like at the 80, almost all those.
- [50:05]
A
KPI metrics are very, very consistent within a few percent. When I say a few, like 2 to 3%. So when he's talking about like cost per lead, like, we know, okay, this is the average cost per lead of all of our marketing team, all of our marketing sources. Here's the average cost per lead. Here's the estimated raw leads are going to get in the market. Here's the estimated set percentage that we have off historical data. Out of that set percentage, how many of those are going to net set to an appointment? Of those net appointments, how many are going to occur into a demo? And based on historical data, how many are going to occur to a sale? Our average selling price. Take the overall leads that we got as net appointments. Divide that by the revenue. It gives you your net volume per share lead. We know from that point on exactly all the metrics is. It just flows down the chart. And then from there we can basically say we know that for the year last year we installed 91% of our net revenue as a team. So if we put our NET target at 92 or 93%, we know that Detroit's going to install X amount of dollars at the end of the month. And that's how we set our targets every month. But you know, crazy as numbers are, it's like we are within the first Q1. We were within like $200,000 of profit.
- [51:14]
C
Wow.
- [51:14]
A
In the surplus.
- [51:15]
C
Yeah.
- [51:15]
A
That's how close it was to them.
- [51:17]
C
Yes. That's fascinating. Yeah, that's fascinating.
- [51:20]
B
Yeah. If you, if you don't know your metrics as a business owner, the inside out conversion rates across the entire organization, you're not. My opinion, you're not running your business. Your business is running you. Hope is not a strategy. So you need to know everything about how your business converts because then you have a business plan.
- [51:38]
C
Guys, thanks for the, thanks for the deep dive into the sort of founding 24 months. Like, what a hell of a story. This was awesome. I feel like I learned a ton. Brain spinning a little bit. But I can't wait to go back across the parking lot and drive some of this stuff forward. If someone's thinking about launching or if someone is thinking about an entrepreneurial venture, like what's a. What's a quick hit from each of you on how they should be approaching this, Gosh.
- [52:09]
B
I always say be honest with you. I always say don't. It's. It's crazy. It's nonstop. It's relentless. It'll take every ounce of you. But if you're built for that, you need to do everything within your business. You need to do everything, know everything within your business. You need to have a system and a process for how the playbook of how this is going to go. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't do it personally have done this if we didn't know what the playbook was going to be, if that makes sense. It's the most rewarding thing in the world. It's punishing when it doesn't go right. A lot of sleepless nights and a lot of stress. But it all at the end of the day starts with people. As a business owner, don't ever for one second think that you're special because you're not. It's about the people that you have working for you. The one team, one dream. And if you don't have good people working for you, you're not going to get where you want to go.
- [53:11]
A
I would say that everything starts in a business that you're going to start in this industry at least, or any really, any industry. It starts in sales and marketing. So if you have those two things planned out, the rest of the business can formulate to the way it needs to do. Sales drives your business. Marketing gets you in front of the audience, right? So you need to have those two things dialed in. And then I would say build a business that is repeatable. If it takes you to do every facet of your business. Rethink the business plan. If you have to physically go execute the service or sell the product yourself, revisit the business plan. Because you want to be able to teach someone a process or a system that you can repeat and take some of that workload off of you to be able to scale your business and make business decisions from the top line, looking down on your business so that you're not missing all the things that turn into losing profit or possibly going out of business. Right? It happens quick. So if you don't know your numbers and you don't have a time to reflect and look back and look at the things that are going on in the business. It does. It happens quick. That's why so many people go out of business so quickly, you know, because they're having to do too many things inside their business. So find a process, find a system. Make sure that you can repeat that process and that's the start of a business plan.
- [54:25]
C
Yeah, yeah. I think for both of our industries. I think that roughly tracks because I think everybody starts with, hey, I'm a, I think about your industry specifically. Like I, I can't count how many bathroom remodelers that I know. And they're all like, you know, a million dollars of revenue.
- [54:45]
A
And it's because they're not sales. Like, they're installation money.
- [54:48]
C
Yeah, they're installation. It's a fulfillment crew. Yeah.
- [54:51]
B
Correct.
- [54:51]
C
Yeah, I agree. I agree. If you want to hear more, go down to ownandoperated.com if people want to get a hold of you guys, how can they do it?
- [54:59]
B
Www.premier-homepros.com yeah, active on LinkedIn. Both of us are on LinkedIn and.
- [55:04]
A
Then both, both of us individually are actively on LinkedIn. Correct.
- [55:08]
C
Yeah.
- [55:09]
B
Shoot me a message.
- [55:10]
C
Awesome. Thanks.
- [55:11]
B
Happy to give advice to anybody.