Rebecca and Lon build out a coaching empire that takes full use of the manuals and techniques they developed building successful home service companies.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

[Seaside Plumbing Ad]

Rick:

Told you, Brian.

Brian:

Told me what?

Rick:

This is part two of last week’s episode.

Brian:

Oh, yeah. And it was getting good.

Rick:

If you missed it, go back and listen to part one first. Take it away, fellas.

Rebecca Cassel:

Yeah, so, Lon, as I said, he was my business partner, and it was funny. I would say, “That sometimes you really like your business partners and sometimes you don’t.” And I think Lon and I went through the, hey, I don’t like you very much, but we really respect each other. We had very different strengths and weaknesses. I am very operational, strategic, and accounting. He was sales and marketing and relational. And so the combination was pretty fierce.

And he called me one day and said, “Hey, we’re going to start an organization. I just got invited to join a group of investors in St. Louis to start an organization that will help more contractors.” And he said, “We’re going to actually branch out of just doing HVAC. I think we’re going to do plumbing and maybe eventually electrical.” I go, “Wow, that’s really exciting.” He goes, “I’m moving to St. Louis, so I’ll keep in touch with what’s going on.”

I was living in North Carolina, and he was living in Illinois at the time. And I thought, wow, what a cool thing. I go, “Well, if I can be of help, obviously I’m here doing it, writing operations manuals or procedures, or obviously I’d love to be a client. So when you get this all up and going, that’ll be exciting.” About three months later, he called me, and he said, “Hey, I think you should be a part of this.”

And I was like, “What do you mean? I’m running an HVAC business in a completely different state.” And again, before all the technology where you could do everything remote, he goes, “I think what we’re going to do is going to really change the industry dramatically, and I know you would want to be a part of that.” And he said, “Why don’t you find a way to develop our comfort advisor into the general manager, and let’s get this going to where maybe you could come be a part of this operationally.”

Stephen Semple:

And which business was this, Rebecca?

Rebecca Cassel:

This was Success Group International.

Stephen Semple:

This was Success Group, okay.

Rebecca Cassel:

Yes. At the time we had an umbrella name called BenVest, but it’s what became, we started Plumber Success first, but it was Success Group International. And so I went in and talked with some of the other founders about what we’re going to do, the CEO, Jim Abrams and Lon was already employed, and I got to meet Patty Myers, who is their VP of Finance, and I ended up being the fourth employee. We started in St. Louis and said, “Hey, we’re going to build an organization that helps home services be successful. We’re going to impact lives by helping these business owners become more successful.”

Stephen Semple:

So I want to step back and cover just a couple of other things. It’s amazing you had the opportunity to work with Jim so closely, with Jim Abrams. And anybody in the home services or the marketing space knows that name, like a famous, famous guy. So you had a chance to learn a lot from him, but you also had a chance to learn a lot from another marketing person who has a lot of fame in the home services space because I believe it was when you and Lon went to see Roy Williams, it was about one hour, wasn’t it?

Rebecca Cassel:

It was. So what happened, Jim Abrams and John Young were partners. Lon was an original investor. And so as a fourth employee, Patty always felt like we were founders too.

Stephen Semple:

Hey, according to this interview, we’ll take out the felt like, you were founders. We’re going to edit that.

Rebecca Cassel:

And we’ll edit this part too. But it wasn’t at the moment that we started the business. So I became, and not by marriage, by the way, I was my own coder, and then Lon and I get married. We’ll edit all that little piece out. So, yeah, I had the wonderful opportunity to learn from John. Yeah, John was fantastic marketer, really great at direct mail. And as we grew helping contractors, we did plumbing, we did HVAC, we did electrical, and we did roofing.

Some of our plumbing members said, “We’d really like to have national advertising, and we’d really like to have a national-looking truck.” And we started to kind of play around with this concept of having a national brand. And John Young was really excited about that because that made some of the marketing techniques and strategies easier when you’re doing it just for one brand, right? And I do remember in the conference room, one of our attorneys said, “Hey, this kind of starting to feel like a franchise here, so if you guys are going to do this, you probably need to form a franchise.” And that’s kind of how Benjamin Franklin, The Punctual Plumber was born, is that our members were asking for this national brand, this national advertising, this ability to do that. And so we started with Benjamin Franklin, but The Punctual Plumber, I believe was actually coining by Rory Williams.

I mean, John was looking for unique selling propositions and ways to get our message out and got introduced to Rory’s just whole thought process on building market share and brand awareness. And in our space, no one had ever really done that before. There weren’t contractors that were building brands.

You would go to the Yellow Pages and look for somebody, but you weren’t hearing them on the radio or seeing them on TV at that point in time. And so I know John was coming back all excited and talking about Broca’s area of the brain and all these… and iambic pentameters and all these things we had to do as a result of him meeting with Roy. So Benjamin Franklin, The Punctual Plumber, that rhyming that came out of some of those meetings with Roy. And so we started first with Benjamin Franklin and then decided to also then do the HVAC franchise. It was one hour heating and air conditioning, always on time, or you don’t pay a dime.

Stephen Semple:

Yep. Another one.

Rebecca Cassel:

Mr. Sparky Electric came from Patrick Kennedy who was our partner on the electrician success side and had a wonderful brand, and we began franchising with his brand. And so that became kind of our next generation of portfolio companies that kind of came from Success Group International.

Stephen Semple:

Which were look powerhouses. I didn’t realize, it’s funny how many times I’ve heard the story because being a partner with Roy and hanging out with Roy, I never realized that Benjamin, Franklin Plumbing was the first one. I had always thought it was One Hour, then Ben Franklin and then Sparky. So thank you for educating me on it. I’ve had the order wrong this entire time. And it’s funny, now that you say it, there’s certain conversations that I think back to and I go, “Oh, okay. There’s a couple of things now that make more sense that that would actually have been the order.” That’s cool.

But one of the things I want people to also understand is willingness to do some things that are really out there, and the successes come from that. And there was one story you shared about the newspaper ad. Now I know this is going back a little bit, but it also speaks to when something happens, and if it’s different, it has a power to it. And you know the ad I’m talking about, I don’t have to give anything away here.

Rebecca Cassel:

It annoyed me for a really long time, and it’s now funny.

Stephen Semple:

At the time, it really wasn’t.

Rebecca Cassel:

Yeah, at the time that Lon and I were business partners, and he said, Look, I’m going to give you a couple different newspaper ads. We’re going to try some direct mail, but I’m going to tell you right now, these ads are going to probably get you 30 to 40 leads.” And I was like, “No way. Come on, really?” And he goes, “Yep.” He goes, “They’re written in a specific way.” They were written by John Young actually. And so there’s a newspaper ad that he sent to me, and it said, the headline was, “How to buy a heating and air conditioning system for as little as 13.99 a week.” So that was the headline. And John always had this theory that you need to put a picture of a person and give them...

#181: Rebecca Cassel – Part 2 – Partnerships Take Work