The Entrepreneur’s Journey
Being an entrepreneur isn’t for the faint of heart. Running your own business means long days that stretch far beyond a 40-hour work week, tackling challenges head-on, and sometimes feeling like you’re building the plane while it’s already taking off.
On this episode, David Holt, Contractor University’s General Manage, takes you inside the unfiltered life of an entrepreneur. From balancing the demands of your business and time with family, to knowing when to push forward and when to adjust course — David shares the hard truths and practical insights every business owner needs to hear.
Discover how to navigate uncertainty and find resilience in the chaos, so you can thrive as both a leader and a human being.
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Audio Transcription (in beta, please be wary of typos)
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:26:05
Welcome to another episode of Cracking the Code, where we uncover the principles that drive real success in the Hvac industry. Today’s episode is a little different, and honestly, very special to me. For more than 40 years, my wife has been walking an entrepreneurial journey side by side with me. The highs and the lows, the road trips, the trade shows and the long nights building something out of nothing.
00:00:26:07 – 00:00:49:04
In this rare occasion, Kelli joins me on camera to share her side of the story. What it’s really like to be married to an entrepreneur, to raise a family while building businesses and to hold it all together when the entrepreneurial seizure takes over. This isn’t just a business story, it’s a life story. I hope you’ll find it both inspiring and humbling.
00:00:49:05 – 00:00:57:11
So let’s get cracking. You.
00:00:57:13 – 00:01:22:11
Folks, meet my wife, this Kelly Holt. I’m David Holt, general manager of Contractor University. And, this is a rare opportunity for me to get my wife in front of a camera and kind of interview her about 41 years of being married to an entrepreneur. That’s really what it comes down to. So we’re going to talk a little bit about entrepreneurial journey.
00:01:22:11 – 00:02:00:01
So we got married in 1984. This is 2025. And in fact, we just celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary about two weeks ago. And in 1985, we got married in 84, 1985. I had the. Little entrepreneurial seizure that they talk about in the E-myth book, and I was working for a software company in Atlanta, Georgia, and just decided, you know what?
00:02:00:03 – 00:02:24:20
I can do this on my own. So, like, so many contractors, like my grandfather was working for somebody else, decided to start his own business, went from working for somebody else to working for himself and went from being tied to a crazy boss to now being tied to a lunatic. A guy who didn’t really know anything about running a business.
00:02:24:21 – 00:02:42:16
Now, fortunately, I went to business school, as you know, at the university of Georgia. That’s where we met. So go dawgs. Yes, indeed. So I had a little bit of a business experience, but going to work for the big mainframe software company back in the day was, you know, I got to see a little slice of it.
00:02:42:16 – 00:03:01:21
I didn’t do marketing. I didn’t hire anybody. I didn’t fire anybody. I didn’t really know what I didn’t know. I mean, I knew conceptually, but we started a little software company together. We did back in 1985 called H2 solutions. Right. And,
00:03:01:23 – 00:03:32:21
Well, we had a son in 1987. So about two years into that, we had a we had a little baby boy. Right. And what were you doing during this period of time as it relates to H2? I was keeping up. I was doing, I guess what you weren’t I was writing software documentation. I was teaching people how to use the software.
00:03:32:23 – 00:03:52:14
Packaging the software, sending you off for three weeks at a time. Yeah. And so part of, all of those all those things that you did, and you did a great job, by the way, without the tools that we have today, it would have been much easier had we had the tools we have today. I mean, we actually literally cut and paste like documentation together.
00:03:52:15 – 00:04:16:23
We were print that report, cut it up, cut it up, put it on, tape it tape, copy it, and then make that master copy. I mean, we literally did cut and paste. Because technology wasn’t what it is today. No. How well did your early childhood education degree come into writing software, documentation and all that? What did it have to do with that?
00:04:17:04 – 00:04:38:07
Well, you definitely write it for a fifth grade education. Well, that was good. So realistically, though, you had no training in that. You’ve never written documentation before in your life. You never supported software in your life. You never taught an adult how to use a software program. And think about it. Think about the time frame. We’re talking 1985, 86, 87 timeframe.
00:04:38:09 – 00:04:57:19
Computers were new. Where was windows 95? It was ten years out. It wasn’t windows. It was tabs or something like that. It wasn’t even windows. Windows didn’t exist. So it’s like it might might have existed in Redmond, Washington, while they were trying to develop it, but it didn’t exist in the market. We were we were on the Da platform.
00:04:57:19 – 00:05:14:21
So we were we we were true pioneers on this thing. We had modems back in the day. We had to dial up to check our email if we even had an email address. Right. So, we didn’t even have email back then. Well, sure, we had some, but we didn’t use it much because it just wasn’t part of that part of that process.
00:05:14:21 – 00:05:39:17
So in that little, time frame you mentioned a minute ago, sending me away for three weeks at a time. So back in the day, right? Yeah. If we were going to do a demonstration of the software for a contractor, we couldn’t get on zoom. No, there was no zoom. Couldn’t get on 285 and yeah, got on Interstate 285 and headed north to Nashville.
00:05:39:18 – 00:05:59:15
Right, right. So it was pack up a desktop computer and a monitor and the whole nine yards that we had to we had to pack up the truck basically. Load up everything and then go set that machine up at that contractor’s place, demonstrate the software and they’d say let’s do it. And you’re like, oh crap. Now I got to go configure it.
00:05:59:20 – 00:06:23:23
We were configuring equipment for people because we were putting some of the very first computers, Novell networks, printers, CPUs, you know, screens. So our favorite cabling, our favorite Prime data okay. Data. What’s that. What’s the model number 321 320 and 321 321 was the wide ones. 3/20 was eight and a half by 11. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah we sold a lot of okay data products.
00:06:23:23 – 00:06:45:09
We had a lot of Novell networks we were putting in. We didn’t I mean when, when we got color monitors, man, we thought we’d gone to heaven because most of them were either green green screens or yellow orange screens. We had some of those. And then finally the color came out and we’re like, wow, this is great. So our first computer, in fact, I had to borrow the money from my new wife to buy our first computer because I didn’t have any money yet.
00:06:45:09 – 00:07:09:09
I was just out of college. We still have that computer. Probably she won’t let me throw it. It’s a no. You way. It’s in the attic and it won’t start. Yeah, well, it’s a it’s a compact pluggable. It looks like a sewing machine. Really? Yeah. That little bitty screen. 5.25in floppy drives. We did take out one of the floppy drive and put a hard drive in ten megabyte.
00:07:09:11 – 00:07:28:02
Now your phone, you take a picture, and it’s ten more than ten Meg. And a lot of cases, it’s crazy. You know, there are a lot of people who don’t know what a five and a quarter floppy disk or a three and a half or. Yeah. Anyway, so there’s there’s a lot of technology that we’ve seen together. But you mentioned that three week thing and that’s, it’s a key part of the conversation I want to have with you.
00:07:28:02 – 00:07:56:14
And that is what happens when your entrepreneur entrepreneurial spouse is so married to the business that even though your entrepreneurial spouse was thinking they were doing all this work and traveling all over the country for you and the kid at that time, that wasn’t kids at this time, there was kid, the other ones coming about three years later.
00:07:56:16 – 00:08:17:14
I mean, how difficult was that on you to be there at the office and help and run the business? We had multiple employees at this point. I mean, company was growing, in spite of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing from a business standpoint. How hard was it for you to basically manage the business?
00:08:17:14 – 00:08:36:03
Well, I’m out running all over the country, you know, showing up and talking at seminars and doing trade shows and installing computers and all that because I was doing all. You were living the life that was having too much fun. Yeah, I was I was doing what I’m what I was born to do, which is help contractors be better tomorrow than they are today.
00:08:36:09 – 00:08:54:15
And that system helped them. One way to kind of put it in context with today’s community. You know, everybody knows about, like, service titan. Great, great software program. Lots of people using it. There are other great alternatives out there. Total office manager. There’s a bunch of different ones that are out there. They’re great.
00:08:54:17 – 00:09:17:08
App has got cool stuff. The, the folks at Field Edge, they’ve got cool stuff. I mean, lots of good stuff. House call pro, all these guys got great tools. We created the first service Titan ish kind of program on the Dart’s platform, on a Novell network. And, it’s just it’s just crazy to think that, you know, we were we were pioneers in that part of the market.
00:09:17:08 – 00:09:35:20
There were other guys that were doing things at that time, but they weren’t doing it on the DOS platform. They were doing it on different, different operating systems. Anyway, all that being said, how hard was that on you? I had to do it all. Had to get Steven up, get him out, had to get to work. Yeah. So getting out means what?
00:09:35:21 – 00:09:55:01
We had to take him to daycare? Yeah, we had to serve him out. Right? You didn’t have the I didn’t get to be a stay at home mom. Yeah. Yeah. So, so part of being an I call this an entrepreneurial widow is basically I was more married to the company and working my butt off for you too.
00:09:55:01 – 00:10:02:11
But I wasn’t there for you or him. Right. How hard was it? It was.
00:10:02:13 – 00:10:36:20
It could be looked at as very difficult. I didn’t know any different, but we. I think we did real well till we hit a brick wall. Yeah, it was so. It was hard from the beginning because you had to do all those things without me being around for a lot of time. It got worse over time. The three weeks at a time stuff didn’t come until 2 or 3 years later, after we’d done a lot of the trade shows and we had the momentum going and all that and and yeah, I came home one day early in 2000.
00:10:36:22 – 00:10:58:02
No, I’m sorry, 1991. In 1991. I came home from a three week long road trip. You dressed up really nice. I can still see you standing there in her nice little townhouse. And you had our daughter then at that point. So 1991, our daughter was early 91. She was not even two years old yet. No, she wasn’t even one year old.
00:10:58:04 – 00:11:18:15
Right? That’s right. 1990 is her birthday. So little Jan was not even a year old yet. Jennifer was all. She was dressed up really nice. And you had her cradled in your arms. And Stephen was sitting over there on the couch, and he was just, like, terrified. Terrified. Don’t move. Yeah. So that’s what. That’s what mom said just before dad walks in the door.
00:11:18:17 – 00:11:51:04
Don’t move. Because certain people’s circuit breaker might have tripped at that point. I walk in the door, I’m thinking, man, it’s a great reception. Everybody’s all dressed up real nice and all that, but she hands me my daughter, and she says, I’m going to dinner. And out the door she went. 1991. And I’m like, We have cell phone.
00:11:51:04 – 00:12:14:21
So I couldn’t call up and say hi. Why the face? I mean what’s up? She jumps in her little baby blue Mercedes and she’s gone. She’s gone. She’s, she’s she’s Cadillac and right and well she’s Mercedes right out the door and leaves me with a one year old, less than one year old and a three year old. The minute the door closes, Steven unfreeze is.
00:12:14:23 – 00:12:32:07
Hey, Danny. What you bring me? All right. Because usually I bring a little something from trips, right? And so I play with the kids for a minute. I’m thinking, what’s going on? I mean, where did she go? Is she coming back? And who she going out to dinner with and all that? And so who is she coming back?
00:12:32:07 – 00:12:53:10
I mean, I’m a pretty resourceful guy. Walked up stairs and opened your underwear drawer, and there were still underwear there. So, like, she’s coming back. She’s coming back. But, I thought it’s probably a good idea that I have the kids in bed. When you got back around 1230, 1:00 and so I put the kids to bed, you know, played with them for a while, put them to bed.
00:12:53:10 – 00:13:17:00
Now I’m sitting on the couch where Stephen was sitting like, oh okay. Sounds like we need to talk. You need to listen. You help bring these babies into this world. You need to help raise them. Yeah. She didn’t say quite that. And she said you help make these babies, you need help raise them. And then she said I’m going to bed.
00:13:17:02 – 00:13:42:17
Notice the underline on I’m so in 41 years of marriage, that’s the only not asleep on the couch. You so lucky. Till and I still got the ring on. We’re good. Only know how to slip on the couch because it was way too cold upstairs. There was no reason to go upstairs. It was just way too cold. But I spent a lot of time on that couch thinking about, okay, this, I think I get it.
00:13:42:19 – 00:14:09:01
We had some conversations the next morning, and, it became pretty clear that a divorce was in order. No, but it was a divorce. Have you ever said that? Oh, no. No, it wasn’t a divorce. You. It is a divorce of my lifestyle. I needed to divorce the lifestyle because I was committing way too much time at your experience expert that I was creating way too much, taking way too much time away from you and the kids.
00:14:09:01 – 00:14:27:13
Right. All right. No help at all. I was just I was going well, I mean, think about how you were going to do it all. You didn’t delegate very well. You didn’t learn to delegate at that time. You felt you had to answer every call. You had to be there at all times. You had to do all the demos.
00:14:27:13 – 00:14:42:17
You had to be on the road because you wouldn’t ask anyone else to do any of it. Yeah, nobody could do it as good as me. No sound. It was. Oh, man, that’s the entrepreneurial problem that we run into is like all of a sudden you’re you’re scaling up a little bit and yet you’re still trying to do it all.
00:14:42:17 – 00:15:07:04
It’s like a service tech trying to be a service tech and an installer and a sales guy and, business owner operator. We always gravitate to things we like the most, right? I actually wrote the software. Right. Me and Bob, we, we wrote that software so no one knew it better than you. We, I mean I knew it and I come from the business and when we designed the software what do we do.
00:15:07:06 – 00:15:26:03
We went down to my dad’s business. My dad was running his dad’s business at that point, went down and we observed what they needed to be a good dispatching system and to be a good, you know, tied into a really solid accounting system called Great Plains Accounting. Back in the day, which is now Microsoft Dynamics. For those of you that know what that product is.
00:15:26:05 – 00:15:56:06
Right. We, we did a lot of work. We knew a lot of things. We and yeah, so it was kind of like my story of being a third generation HVC family member that happened to write a piece of software resonated really well with the market. And, in October of 87 is when things really started going crazy, because that was number one the month Steven was born, but also number two, it was, an article that came out in the HPC news that said son computerize his dad’s HPC business.
00:15:56:11 – 00:16:14:06
Oh, we couldn’t keep up. And the phone just kept ringing right. That’s when it got nuts. That’s when it was crazy because before that was pretty easy. We were dealing with people like Delta, AT&T and Coca-Cola and the Federal Reserve Bank. The National Park Service, Home Depot. I mean, we were dealing with corporate clients in Atlanta. I’d have to travel.
00:16:14:11 – 00:16:33:23
I was always home. But once that article hit gone, it was over. It was over. We were gone. Wound up my brother because he had had the experience, but he had this much computer experience at zero. So we had to teach him how to turn on a computer, which was fun. So thought he could be the guy to go out there and do the travel.
00:16:34:01 – 00:16:51:15
And you know, that worked for a while. But and we did a lot of trade shows together and things like that, and that was good. So it’s now two holes in this case. Right. And that was fun. And then we started the user group and we agreed to the user group hug H2 user group. It was the hug.
00:16:51:15 – 00:17:21:00
We called it. You know, all that stuff put a strain on, on us. And so in 91, I decided it was, divorce you or divorce the company. Which ones are going to be? Because I couldn’t let go. You’re talking about the delegation thing. I couldn’t let go of doing it. I knew the only way that I could do it would be just cut the cord so I had a friend of mine that actually was at our wedding, who also happened to be my first boss out by college by the name of John McCarthy.
00:17:21:02 – 00:17:41:03
And so John, was like a kind of a little business mentor for me. And, and we still talk today, and, John, when I said to me, I got to do something, got to change this. And he. That’s funny because, me and Kayla, we were talking I’m talking about, like, I would love to have my own business.
00:17:41:05 – 00:17:58:14
And I’m like, wow, that’s kind of cool. This is perfect timing, isn’t it? And so, John, we worked out a deal and John took over the reins of of H2, and he wound up taking it to newer heights because windows now was coming in. So he transitioned it over to windows and, and took the business to a new height.
00:17:58:14 – 00:18:30:03
And that was great. And then he sold the business. And we won’t go down all those paths right now. But, we took a major right turn from Smyrna, Georgia, heading south on Interstate 285, connecting to Interstate 85 South. And we did something I said I would never do. They moved to Columbus, Georgia. I moved back home to where my parents both were born and raised, right where my grandfather’s heating and air business is, was.
00:18:30:05 – 00:19:00:12
And, We did it again. Walked in the door to a heating and air business. Had been around since 1956. So we’re in 1991 now. August 2nd, 1991, we moved to Columbus, Georgia, and I’m the general manager of Heating and Air heating and air business. And I know this much technical about heating and air business. Now, I’ve been helping a lot of heating and air businesses get organized.
00:19:00:14 – 00:19:18:22
And I told dad, I said, here’s the deal. I don’t want to have to deal with customers. I want to just focus on internal systems. I just want to make sure that we’ve got all the systems in place that we need to have in place to operate this heating and air business effectively, efficiency and so forth. And there was a lot of chaos there.
00:19:18:22 – 00:19:41:05
There was a lot of there was a lot of process missing, as you know. I mean, think about the job folders. I mean, that was a great thing that you took over and created a great process. We’ll talk about that in just a minute. But went into it thinking one thing. And as we got into it, we found other things like, oh my gosh, the commercial side of this business is not making the money, right?
00:19:41:05 – 00:20:01:06
That it looked like it was making from the outside. You’re looking around at this big 26,000 square foot building and you got all these trucks out in the yard. You got a 5000 square foot air conditioned sheet metal shop, and you got people running around like chickens with their heads cut off and billboards all over town, boards all over town.
00:20:01:06 – 00:20:19:02
Back in the day, we can have a website, bagels, big old ad in the Yellow Pages. Oh yeah, a full page couple of them. Anyway, it’s like we, looked like we had a lot of things going on, but the problem is we started doing the math right up business major and start doing the math. I get Lotus one, two, three out and I start.
00:20:19:04 – 00:20:38:07
Yeah. Forgot about that. So we were using Lotus and and I’ve start doing this math and I’m realizing, wait, we’re not making money over here. We’re not making money over here. Golly, we’re stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Yeah, there was a lot of that going on. And there was some. There were some, inherited money that mom was dumping into the company.
00:20:38:07 – 00:21:01:12
And it wasn’t even being recorded. There was just a lot of things that were like, what? I thought I was walking into something that was rocking and rolling while I walked into an entrepreneurial wasp nest. My grandfather had already retired. Dad had taken it over. Now my dad, smart guy, college educated, in mechanical engineering. So it was actually a natural fit for him from a technology standpoint.
00:21:01:14 – 00:21:23:15
But prior to him going to hold service company, he flew airplanes for the United States Navy for 21 years. Right. What does flying airplanes for the United States Navy have to do with running a heating and air absolutely nothing, or running any business all right. You have an unlimited budget. You could call the naval personnel or the naval, what do they call it?
00:21:23:15 – 00:21:46:00
The Bureau of Naval Personnel. You could call the Bureau of Naval Personnel. And you can say, I need a guy that can change a tire on an airplane, and they just show up. Amazingly enough, with the tools and training they already need to be successful. There’s what they’re doing, so you didn’t have to train them. Right. And so he came into the business with an unrealistic world view.
00:21:46:00 – 00:22:06:00
He had a government world view where you could just snap your fingers and people show up. And he used to wear bars on his shoulder that said, yes, sir, commander, whatever you say, commander. And he had the power to put you in the brig, which would be jail. It would put you in jail if you didn’t do your job.
00:22:06:02 – 00:22:30:12
I mean, he had that power to do that, right? And he gets into the into the civilian world, and all of a sudden it’s like people flip you off just as quick and look, especially when they’re your siblings. Well, they’re that too. Yeah. Yeah. So a completely different dynamic. And so when we think about how we got into that situation, we started looking at, okay, we got to change some things.
00:22:30:16 – 00:22:40:01
We were about 80% commercial new construction and about 20% residential at the time. And we weren’t making any money.
00:22:40:03 – 00:23:02:09
Had I known then what I know now? Anyway, fast forward, we start getting processes in place. Things start working, I start doing some math, I start figuring out, we got like, about 18 more people on the payroll than we need. A lot of them shared DNA with me. Ish. Like, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, you name it.
00:23:02:09 – 00:23:19:21
We had a whole bunch of people that were very good people, but they were just the wrong people in the wrong spot, and we didn’t have the processes in place to help them be what they needed to be. So we wound up having a lot of those folks move on to other careers, and they’re all thankful today that they did.
00:23:19:21 – 00:23:44:11
They now retired from their careers and, and doing great. But during that time was a little stressful. Yeah. Because I did the same thing. Hope that I did it H2 yeah. Jump in and start doing stuff that you weren’t trained to do. Yeah. Like accounting. Yeah. She can’t remember. What was I thinking. What was I thinking.
00:23:44:11 – 00:24:02:06
Yeah. Yeah I could do this. Yeah I could do this. Well we were fearless. I mean, that’s one of the things, I guess, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you do have to be fearless. But you also got to get smart. And so we started putting the processes into place, like we had job folders that were just a hodgepodge of stuff and, and and this I call her the queen of notebooks.
00:24:02:08 – 00:24:27:12
This girl can organize information just like that. You look at her wood shop when it’s set up properly, everything’s got a place and everything in its place. And she knows right where to go to find her stuff. Anytime, anywhere. That’s a little chaotic right now. For lots of reasons. We won’t get into today, but the, the key was organization there and having and having things in place to be able to answer questions for people.
00:24:27:14 – 00:24:46:23
So I remember one of the first questions I used to get is general managers. I’d have service techs coming up and say, hey, we’re coming up on Labor Day. If I work 40 hours is Labor Day time and a half. I’m like, what? Where on earth does that make sense? Whoa, was 40 hours. I worked 40 hours.
00:24:46:23 – 00:25:04:07
And you’re going to pay me for 48? Is the extra eight hours. Time and a half is like holiday pay is regular rate. If you work 40 hours, you’ve worked 40 hours, you’re overtime and you’re like, I don’t know if I like that or not. So I said, okay, what does the what does the employee manual say.
00:25:04:08 – 00:25:19:16
What employment. Oh what employment. No. Oh yeah. We did that to make that too. Oh, Lord. Yeah. Yeah. So all those things, so even all the way down to, you know what, how is what are the rules of the game? We don’t have the rules. The game. We didn’t have scoreboards. We didn’t have anything that kind of kept people in line.
00:25:19:16 – 00:25:45:08
No one for even winning or losing. And so we started getting all those pieces in place and things changed. We realized that people who are technical, when you put them in a sales situation, not always the best person. So we started building a sales process, and this is where my goal with dad went a little sideways. I said I didn’t want to have anything to do with the customers.
00:25:45:08 – 00:26:08:12
I want to just work on the systems. Well, when I started doing the math on the residential sales side, it was pretty clear that we didn’t need the people that were selling for us because they were giving jobs away, left and right. We weren’t making any money on them. They weren’t processing things right, right. And when we put together a price book that we put together a good, better, best price book in a Lotus one, two, three.
00:26:08:14 – 00:26:30:21
I still have copies today. So it’s a good, better, best price book. And I went through a lot of different iterations of designing this thing. But when we finally got something that was really working right for us, I give it to the sales guys and they were just like, I can’t sell it for that price. Okay? So I went from having salespeople one day to having no salespeople the next day.
00:26:30:23 – 00:26:51:11
And then dad said, all right, smart guy, you’re now busted from general manager to sales manager. And it is up to you to figure this out, right? So next thing I know, I don’t know the first thing about a condenser or a furnace or any of that, but I did know how to communicate with people and I took my sales book, and I started the sales process, and I built the sales process.
00:26:51:13 – 00:27:13:19
I came up with four little cards to help have a conversation with a homeowner. I asked questions. It was a consultative sales process before I knew that’s what it was, but it was all conversational. It wasn’t. Here’s what a condensing unit does because I didn’t know. I didn’t know how I did it, I didn’t care, right. When did we figure out we even had an air filter at our first house?
00:27:13:19 – 00:27:36:10
When we were married. It was about 18 months before it was 18 months. We were in this place and it started freezing up. I didn’t know there was a filter behind the couch. Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s right. It was behind the couch. Right? It was in the bin right there on that big mud. Anyway, I didn’t know because my parents always took care of it up till then.
00:27:36:12 – 00:27:50:03
Right. We just got married. A do you ever change the filter in your parents house? No. Did you even know there was a filter in your parents house? Probably not. Your dad got under the house to take care of that. You didn’t do it. Your mom didn’t do it. We didn’t know any of that. Yeah. So as kids, we didn’t know.
00:27:50:03 – 00:28:07:02
So the first thing, it didn’t work. There was no owner’s manual that came with it. Now she’s got notebooks, all that stuff in a notebook. We can find it now. Right. So, you know, we started looking at all these different pieces. We started putting these systems in place, and next thing you know, we’re going from not making any money to.
00:28:07:04 – 00:28:30:21
This could this might, could work. This might, could work. Right. So we started hiring people to operate the process. Right. We want it with three guys. Ronnie Drew, Roderick. And I can’t think of the third guy’s name right now. He was from Virginia. You can’t remember either. Okay. Anyway, got got answered an ad for for sales role situation.
00:28:30:23 – 00:28:53:11
They’re all down there. Yeah, it was there. That’s right. Other brother Darrell. Yeah. Another mother brother. Anyway, we put the sales process together. We hired guys. Next thing you know, we’re kicking, we got sales coming in. We’re selling at the right price. We’re offering choices. Good, better, best. We’re having a presentation that makes sense to homeowners instead of a bunch of technical stuff.
00:28:53:13 – 00:29:13:21
And. And Ronnie and Roderick, they had zero Hvac experience. In fact, when I first interviewed Roderick, it was on the soccer field. They were standing next to me. His kids were playing with our kid. Right, right. And, I said, Roderick, man, why are you always gone during the week and you only show up on weekends? And he says, Because I’m working in my family’s catfish farm.
00:29:13:23 – 00:29:35:08
I said, number one, I didn’t know there’s such a thing as a catfish farm. So he told me more catfish. I love catfish, so they raised catfish for the restaurant industry. The problem is, it was about a six hour drive to where he went to work. So he would go to Tennessee and work to catfish farm all week and come home on the weekends and spend time with his family and sounds good.
00:29:35:10 – 00:29:58:16
No way to live. Yeah, exactly. Sounds very familiar, I said. Roderick. I became very conscious of how work impacts family life at that point. Right. By 91, I definitely knew it. And going forward, I’ve used that ever since. So anytime I work with people, I said, look, man, if this is taken away from your family, your family’s first priority, you got to make sure you take care of your family now because you don’t get those days back.
00:29:58:16 – 00:30:15:15
No you can’t. There’s this not going to happen. But anyway, so, Roderick, I mean, the guy stepped out of a catfish pond and in the whole service. I don’t know anything about heating here. I said, let me ask you a question. He said, what’s that? I said, Roderick, if your air conditioner is not working, what are you going to do?
00:30:15:17 – 00:30:27:19
He said, I’m going to call halt service company. Exactly. Boom. That’s all you need to know. That’s all you need to know. Did you know that we can fix it? And you know that we can replace it, and you know we can do that. That’s all you need to know. I’ll teach you the rest of what you need to know.
00:30:28:01 – 00:30:49:20
So I taught him how to use the menu, how to use the price, put it also on bigger and better jobs than me. He didn’t know any different, cause he didn’t know any different. He wasn’t afraid of offering the choices that were in the book. He says, oh, that’s how you do it. Yeah. So Mr. and Mrs. Smith, based on my evaluation of your home, this is the right size and type of equipment to properly heat cool your house.
00:30:50:01 – 00:31:09:00
I’ll let you take a look at this page and answer any questions that you have. Hook. Boom. It’s done. They get two choices. Just like going to a restaurant. Like we were at a nice restaurant last night. We had three people at the table. Did we all get the same thing? No, no, no, three of none of us got the same thing.
00:31:09:02 – 00:31:29:03
Bob got something. You got something? I got something right. So it doesn’t matter. It’s where we under any stress come to ask? No pressure. There was. The server did not say. You really ought to eat this, David. No, no. They gave us our choices and we picked. There was no stress. That’s what we built. A whole service company, companies.
00:31:29:03 – 00:31:53:13
We built a stress free sales environment so homeowners could do a stress free purchase. And so all those systems that we put in place the pricing systems, the price presentation systems, the communication with the customer systems, those were all learned at school, hard knocks. Now we have a we have an opportunity to share it with the entire industry.
00:31:53:13 – 00:32:17:13
And I’m super stoked that you’re still part of my team. Yep. Thank you. Thank you for your hard work. Well, thank you for being there and sticking with me all these years, because let me tell you something. They always say that, you know, behind any successful man is a more successful woman. This is a successful woman. Thank you.
00:32:17:15 – 00:32:53:20
Great mom. Even better. Grandmother. Yeah. So when you think about what you’re doing for your family as a business owner, as a business leader, as a manager of service techs or manager of installers or manager of salespeople, when you think about what you can do to make their life better tomorrow than it is today, I’m telling you, the system is the key.
00:32:53:22 – 00:33:23:17
Coming up with ways to simplify processes that you can teach people how to perform, when you can simplify it, you can take ordinary people. We’re just two ordinary people. We were able to produce extraordinary results by implementing systems. And I think it’s, I think Michael Gerber, I think he actually says this in his book, The E-myth. And if you haven’t read it, you need to.
00:33:23:19 – 00:33:51:14
And my friend Ken Goodrich took and kind of took that to the next level, E-myth Hvac contractor. But in that the key thought process in that is systems work. So you don’t have to. And that’s a good thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t work, you should still work. But systems work so you don’t have to like I don’t have to now teach somebody how to present a price in a price book, because I teach them one time, just like a server at a restaurant.
00:33:51:14 – 00:34:14:00
You teach them how to present the system, the system, their price book, their menu. You teach them how to present the system, the menu, and you answer the questions right. And it’s stress free. So this has been a team effort between me and Kelly for 41 years. Actually, 43 were together two years before we got married at the University of Georgia.
00:34:14:01 – 00:34:42:01
Thank you. Good afternoon. We have again really good opportunity to help you grow your business in ways that maybe you didn’t see. We got really, really, really excited, too, about what we can do with Contractor University, what we can do with Hvac distributor university. And we’ve got another little project right now that’s coming out that’s called Raising Goats.
00:34:42:03 – 00:35:13:01
And let me tell you something. All three of these things have something in common. And that is we’re focused on helping the Hvac industry be better tomorrow than it is today. And it’s been feeding our family now for five generations. My grandfather, my dad, me, my son, and now our granddaughter all involved in the Hvac industry. Right now, my granddaughter is being fed by my son and us occasionally, but, and he’s working in the industry as well, kind of fun.
00:35:13:01 – 00:35:31:05
And he’s worked in the flat rate business he worked in, in our, we, we were involved in, between the time that we sold my dad’s business. That’s a whole nother story. We’ll get to that later. But when we sold the business, that’s when I started training, coaching and consulting. And, the merry go round started again.
00:35:31:07 – 00:36:03:16
And here we are 26 years later. It’s been 26 years since we sold the business. Wow. 26 years later, here we are. You know, general manager, eegee’s contractor, university, Hvac distributor, university and raising goats. And, we’re able to bring all this experience together and bring a lot of friends with us as well. So there are a lot of coaches, trainers and consultants that I know around this industry that are going to be a part of our faculty going forward.
00:36:03:16 – 00:36:35:19
We have some great faculty members already in place. We’re getting rid of that a whole bunch more, and it’s going to be an exciting ride. So I look forward to it. And man, this is, it’s been quite a ride. So it’s David Holt with the Hvac distributor, University Contracting University and raising goats. We’ll talk to you soon on the next edition.
