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In this episode, John and Jack discuss how they redefined their business over the past year, sharing the big wins and game-changing shifts that took them to the next level.
From revamping call centers and rethinking compensation to building a powerhouse inside sales team and unlocking the hidden potential of weekend shifts, they’ll show you how you can turn everyday decisions into massive growth opportunities.
This comprehensive discussion is filled with actionable insights for businesses aiming to scale and achieve higher efficiency in their operations.
Episode Hosts:
🎤John Wilson:@WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr:@TheHVACJack on X
0:00 Introduction
1:58 EOY Successes
3:30 Call Centre Overhaul
8:10 Commission Structures
10:52 Outbound Strategy
14:35 Inside Sales Development
16:30 Sales Packages and Executive Functions
26:02 Call By Call Strategies
27:42 Data-Driven Wins
32:30 Weekend Shifts and Staffing Innovations
35:02 Vendor Negotiations and Cost Savings
39:01 Future Plans and Reflections
Shout out to Service Scalers
In a year where many in the industry faced challenges, we’re thrilled to have hit the low 20s, outperforming expectations and driving serious growth. A huge part of that success is thanks to Service Scalers.
For the past couple of years, Sam Preston and his team have been invaluable partners, helping us achieve:
✅ Best-in-class SEO
✅ Top-tier PPC campaigns
✅ Dominance in LSA and GMB marketing
If you’re in the trades and ready to level up your marketing, do yourself a favor and check out ServiceScalers.com. Sam and his team are killing it right now.
Special Thanks To FieldPulse
FieldPulse is a really awesome Field Service Management (FSM) platform, that helps you save hours every week and keep operations running smoothly. With features like scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, and reporting, it takes the headache out of managing the day-to-day.
If you're looking to streamline your ops, stay ahead of the competition, and focus on what really matters (growth) FieldPulse is a game-changer.
👉 Book a Demo with FieldPulse to get 15% off the annual plan when you mention Owned and Operated.
Owned and Operated Episode #160 Transcript
John Wilson: Our job is to give you the least amount of choice in whether you're going to be effective in your position.
Jack Carr: We're going through that process right now to get to weekly gross margin.
John Wilson: Can we simplify every position in the company to be scalable? the net result was about two and a half to three million dollars. It was a big win.
Wilson just wrapped up the year. In the low 20s and we were pumped. Most of the industry did not have that same level of success. when I think about who was a huge partner for us, top of the list was Service Scalers. We've been working with Service Scalers for a couple of years now, and they've helped us drive best in class SEO, best in class PPC.
And dominate LSA and GMB marketing. They've been a huge partner for us. And we're really grateful for that partnership because it's helped us to take down 46 percent year over year growth. As we think about our budget next year, we're aiming for the low thirties. one of our most strategic partners is going to be service scalers.
They're going to help get us there. They're going to help us stay ahead of AI. They're going to help us keep our SEO relevant. They're going to help keep us on top exactly where we want to be. So make sure you check out service scalers. com. Sam and his team over there is just a bunch of killers. thank you service scalers for your partnership.
Jack Carr: Welcome back.
John Wilson: You did it, man.
Jack Carr: Yeah super excited about this episode today. It's a John and Jack episode, which is always fun.
John Wilson: It's good to be back. I love all these legends, but come on,
Jack Carr: There's a difference sometimes, like the legends, you got to be on point with your questions and getting them to provide the value, but when it's just you and I, we can really dig in.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: So we were talking offline everyone. John has made some massive changes to his business this year. Just me? Both, but in particular, I'm still working through my changes. I don't think they were as successful as yours or scrapped as quickly.
I think that when you go through these changes that they're a little bit more valuable to everyone listening. I can see it growing on camera.
John Wilson: I'm just going to argue because I don't know that they are. Average listeners, your size. So yeah, we can talk about mine.
Jack Carr: Okay. We'll talk about some of mine too, but big changes looking back. what did we change and did it work You've listened to these episodes, we talk about it and then we haven't followed up. So let's hit some of these items that, three, four or five months ago we talked about doing, we did them and now what does it look like?
John Wilson: Do you have a list or just the ones that I remember? Making big changes on.
Jack Carr: I think we had a few, right? There's a few surrounding sales.
Did you want to start off on some of the call center changes?
We can recap what the change was. And then are you still doing it?
John Wilson: We are a unique and I appreciate everybody that tags along every week and reads the newsletter and is in the Facebook group. For a number of reasons but mainly because we're still relatable, I'm not 200 million and you are actively every week listening to me attempting to figure out how to run this business.
Welcome to the ride. And obviously Jack too. I think it's fun because when I think about even just listing these things out like we talked about all of these on the show, every single one we talked about, and we even talked about how we were going to implement it.
We talked about how we were thinking about it. Listen back to a year ago, if you haven't yet, because everything I'm about to talk about, We broke down for 30 to 45 minutes in the last 12 months.
Jack Carr: Exactly how we're going to implement it.
Jack Carr: One of the ones that sticks out to me specifically is call center, right? Call center. You guys did an overhaul of call center this year.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: And I would say we did three or four overhauls, but yeah, we've definitely done the most recent was about two months ago.
It was a structural change to pay, how they're paying. They're moving from. Full salary or hourly to commission, correct? And are you guys still continuing that and what was the outcome?
John Wilson: The genesis of figuring this out was we had Tommy Mello on the show.
Tommy said something that Barreled itself deep in my brain. I couldn't get rid of it. Which was he went and visited this other company, booked 80 calls a day per CSR. And I was like, what in the hell? Our CSR's aren't even taking 80 calls a day, let alone booking 80 calls a day. So that spurred some action on our end.
So yeah, what we did call center has been a really big thing. We've spent a ton of time on this show talking about it. The reason it's been such a big deal for us is, in summer of 23, we only had three call takers. now we have 15, I think maybe a little bit less but we got as big as 22 in the call center.
We've learned a lot as we've iterated and the reason it's been such an adventure and why we're still figuring it out, we feel a lot more comfortable now, but we went from three to 12 call takers and 14 days
Jack Carr: So when you say call takers, are you referring to inside sales, outside sales, CSR, dispatcher, or just inbound?
John Wilson: Inbound.
Jack Carr: Okay, that's a huge growth in inbound.
John Wilson: We didn't have the systems, we didn't have the process, so we iterated live on this show for the past year and a half. The most recent change was we bloated up the staff of our call center, and we didn't feel like we were being super effective What is frustrating is I like to build games that people can self manage for the most part
The mean way of putting it is I would much rather force you to do your job than ask you. When we create compensation and processes and think about how someone's day is going to go in every position. Our job is to give you the least amount of choice in whether or not you're going to be effective in your position.
So that means the least amount of tasks. That means forcing certain things auto dials. That type of thing is like. Hey, I expect this and you can either choose to do it or I can just force it and I know it'll get done that way. So we tend to lean towards the force. So with call center, we really were fighting our own call center to be effective.
We weren't outbounding at the cadence we had to. We were not booking calls. We were not improving measurably. And every time I looked at it, I was just like, this is crazy. Like we have to be able to. Just book the call, like just book the freaking call. We got really aggravated. So what we ended up doing was we looked at our call center team.
We saw about half of them were performing less than they should have been performing. And we had done a lot of coaching. This wasn't like a spur of the moment thing. We had done a lot of coaching. We have a lot of investment into that. And we just weren't there.
So what we did was we changed the compensation structure. And this was a part of our like, let's get ourselves aligned. If you're full hourly, you don't care. But if we align our interests, you do. It went to a very small base compensation with a dollar amount per booked call. It's basically a commission per booked call with a base comment.
The base comp was about a third of what they were making previously, maybe even less. Maybe 20 percent of what they were making previously. It's a small base comp. And the goal was, let's, I want you to make more than you've ever made because you're booking more calls than you ever have. So we ended up having we ended up letting our low performers go, we put our high performers on this new compensation structure, and it did work.
They are making more than they've ever made. They're very excited about it. We have a bought in call center that is really they understand what we're here to do and they go out and do it. We never have to push them to go into outbounds anymore. They just do it because their compensation relies on it.
I had someone earlier, like earlier today Jocelyn, who's awesome walked up to me and she said, Hey, like it's 2 PM and I've done 150 outbounds today. And I was like, that is freaking awesome. And she financially won today.
Jack Carr: Let me ask you two questions based on that.
was there a lot of pressure on you and the marketing team, that compensation structure only works as long as the phones are ringing, right? Outbounds.
That's the point, right? if they don't get inbounds and they're still making great money, but just on the outbound and then the outbound, you guys are full.
John Wilson: that was the literal whole point. And honestly, what ended up happening is they started creating their own systems to win the game.
We didn't have to force it in anymore or train on it. in the first week, they developed their own culture for how to win, which is stuff that would have never happened two weeks before. Exactly. I can see that working.
John Wilson: One of them, his name is William. And his rule of thumb that he came up with on his own.
He told the other call takers and it became adopted was, Hey, for every one inbound, I'm going to make two outbounds period. And he just came up with that on his own. He did it and he's making more than he ever has.
Jack Carr: And so with that where is this list coming from? where do you put the guardrails on outbounding, right?
Cause outbounding, on smaller scale could idealistically get out of hand. You have too many outbounders. They've called everyone in your list a thousand times and now it's spammy versus effective.
John Wilson: It gets curated by marketing. I think talking to your whole customer list twice a year is reasonable.
Reaching out to them four times a year is reasonable. assuming that they'll only pick up half the time.
Jack Carr: So then they're getting outbound lists from the marketing team of people who meet that criteria. That's it. And yeah, that ended up being a big win. How's it worked?
John Wilson: Extremely effective. We have bought in team member call center was not bought in and call centers now bought in and they're financially winning. Their careers are growing, which is awesome. They have advancement opportunities because they get it more and they're growing That was a big deal. That's a win. So really across the board, it was a win.
Jack Carr: I love it, but I don't know why most
John Wilson: I started bringing this up to our call center about a year ago as an option and it finally just clicked Try to get it done.
Jack Carr: I don't see a re and the cool thing about this Is how in terms of implementation of everything that you've done all the big wins that you've received That one doesn't feel like A huge lift to get to especially for you, it was a lot harder because you're bigger, but for someone like our size where we have three people in call center total, like that lift doesn't seem too difficult to get over.
How was the lift comparatively to saying to say, Hey, we had to re redo our whole sales process.
John Wilson: Yeah. It was from my perspective. So we did two different things. We let go a number of low performers, which was five people, so that's a lot. So I think that was the challenging part.
The rest of it, I don't think mattered at all. I didn't actually have anything to do with it. it was an idea that I floated a year ago. I brought it up a few times since. My call center manager Lori, also awesome. Just did it. She's hey, here's I think what we're gonna do.
I already implemented step one. Here's step two. And they just, yeah so my lift was non existent, like it just happened one day, which was awesome. But I do think it is a simple change.
Jack Carr: I think it's one of the easier ones that we go through.
John Wilson: how many calls did you book a day?
if you get paid ten bucks a call this is what you could have made on this new structure. Do you want to do it? if they ask what happens if It's a slow phone's day. You say that's the point. Like you go up on it and now I don't have to ask you to go up on it anymore.
You're just going to do it. So yeah self policed. Cause your top depends on it.
Jack Carr: And last question in regards to it is your inside sales team. Did that change? Or was that part of it? how does that interact now? Cause I'm assuming they're outbounding a lot. they're going towards just booking calls.
They're not really inside selling. Was that a big change that you want to talk about? Because I know that was a big change.
John Wilson: I mean inside sales we launched it last November.
Jack Carr: you created it while we from
John Wilson: Yeah, talked about it, understood it. Look, a year in, it's driven about 4 million.
it was a win. It was a big win. What we've done there is we've adjusted, same thing, we've actually done that with a lot of positions, where we adjust the base comp and raise the commission, which we should have done originally,
Jack Carr: Are those commissions SPF based, or are they actual commission, like percentage based?
John Wilson: Percentage.
So 3 percent of the job, 2 percent of the job, 4 percent of the job, ended up being a big win. we have added some more stuff to inside sales to make it more interesting. inside sales is like a continuous project that we're going to continue talking about inside sales is what call center was. It's the new thing that we think if we can unlock it. we're going to make a lot of things happen. we're excited about that. if it did 4 million in the past 12 months, we think there's a path to 10 million in inside sales through those five or six people next year.
Jack Carr: 4 million in one year is a huge unlock.
John Wilson: It was a giant change. If I think about what happened, why did we grow organically this year? We marketed like crazy. We built an inside sales department and we added weekends. all three of which we've talked about nearly non stop on this show.
Jack Carr: Really interesting. But, there's also the nuance to it, right? if you weren't on Service Titan, you didn't have an opportunity offering section. If your team wasn't offering opportunities in the correct amount, or earning the right to offer opportunities, then inside sales is a harder time to actually close opportunities because they're garbage.
with that being said, that was a big part, not too long ago, is you revamping training and sales opportunities. how has that been? Because I know. That was big. That's like the opposite of call center. That was a big deal for you.
John Wilson: Yeah. So we rebuilt our sales packages.
we did a giant reorg that was a big deal, and ended up being a really big win for us a lot has happened since then. So if I think about what are we doing with inside sales or sales packages, it all comes down to, the 40, 50 people that are in the sales side of the business are now like really focused in on sales.
Whereas beforehand, I don't think they were as focused. next year, we believe this has a lot of promise just cause we are much more aligned across but packages, what we ended up doing yeah, huge change. So we had a loose good, better, best. always have three options type thing.
We got much more deliberate with what is inside those options. What's the quality of option. How do we pre negotiate those options at, to the executive level, because we feel like this is a big mover for us.
Jack Carr: Are you saying that most of those options were designed by, your director of sales what was his name again?
Because we talked about hiring Ryan on this. Was he the one that led the design of those packages? Yep. Very cool. Ryan said we need to be very intentful about, how we're offering how we present and what's inside. Yeah. What's inside. Cause it should be an executive,
John Wilson: it should be an executive function.
we've started to look at price. And price book and packages that is an executive level function or as high up the org chart as you can possibly get it. price is the biggest mover of everything inside your business and how you sell is the biggest mover.
A lot of people delegate that to their service manager.
Jack Carr: I was just going to ask, does that go to the call by call?
John Wilson: I think price is an executive function. Brandon, myself, Ryan, the senior leaders are dealing with price price book and price control because ultimately, if the only thing that matters is our gross margin, then we have to get there.
It has to be in our control.
Jack Carr: And that's why I asked about the compensation structure. And I've actually talked to you offline about this on the inside salespeople is I don't think it's fair to put that on the techs, right? So a tech doesn't need to understand how the inside sales compensation structure works, but if they have ability to mark down price and then it goes back and they mark down the price and they put out all these discounts, it's in the offering.
And now your inside sales team gets it and they've been tasked and they're compensated in a different way. And so they, there's additional. Revenue that gets taken out of that from additional offerings or their compensation structure it's very interesting watching all these little pieces connect, but it's really cool To see that on the sales side.
So it's a you've moved it to an executive function. That's been a big win.
John Wilson: I'm gonna give an even deeper example. So and I was told by this from a member of my team, but there's a large PE firm, like one of the large ones, one of the, top five, they control price book from the PE level to the point where the portfolio companies don't even know what they're paying for the parts or equipment because it is that important.
To revenue and gross margin. they take it out of the branches controls completely and simply tell you what you're allowed to discount to, which I think is a great idea. a lot of times we bring in our frontline leaders because we've set up a bad price book.
And it isn't set up properly, but it has to be set up properly for you to win. So we have people fix it and service managers are playing it. I really don't think that's their function. I think it's an executive function.
Jack Carr: The service manager shouldn't be worrying about price. They should be focusing on training and making sure that the tech is doing the managing of the service of the tech, not worrying about the overall price. The overall revenue is important, but yeah, once again, it's such a small, intricate piece that like you said, in our company we managed it at the executive level, but we're, much smaller executive team.
John Wilson: We had a sales team that just went live and we are trying it. we're not even telling them the cost. here's what you're able to discount it down to, let me know if you sold it. we think it's irrelevant.
we also did that with HVC sales. We've removed the sales people's ability to see material and equipment pricing. Because we think that they have bad habits from wherever they came previously that tells them what they can discount to or what per, what percentage of the material should be, we don't even want them to know.
Because we need to control our gross margin.
Jack Carr: So you're saying that your project manager, your comfort advisor, your salesperson, is going onto site, doesn't know material cost, doesn't know it's irrelevant to their job.
John Wilson: With the ability to give x amount discounts that we pre approved. That is absolutely wild. I think you need it
Jack Carr: I think you need it.
John Wilson: I think it's not important to their job to know our price point One of our big wins of the year is we have gotten better at vendor negotiations, which means our equipment pricing got better and We would have lost all of that.
We would have lost every bit of those hard earned negotiated dollars if we had continued to let them see price point. So we took that away. And I think that's why the big PE firms do it too, because they're so effective at negotiating that Hey, maybe they're paying 20 percent on HVAC equipment versus industry standard of 35.
Recently, I checked out FieldPulse as a field management software for our restoration business. And honestly, I was pretty impressed. The big wins that we saw was it's got two way sync with QuickBooks online and desktop.
It's got some really good dashboards and recording. It's got custom workflows and this is probably one of their most unique features. It does have CRM and it has a lot of the other things that you'd expect out of a field service management software. You're going to have financing and payments, customer booking portals, project management tools, price book, work order management, estimates and invoices.
But where they really shine is the scheduling and dispatch, custom workflows, and the dashboards and reporting. It automated and streamlined our operation and it gave us a bunch of easy tools for scheduling and dispatching our team.
Jack Carr: As a salesperson, I know that it's a very mental game that they have to play and being able to see that number definitely plays a part in their mental game. So just removing that ability, I'm curious to see how that would work. That's really interesting. When did you implement that?
John Wilson: Two months ago.
Jack Carr: So it is a throwback. no, I don't think we brought it up,
John Wilson: I think the further we get, the more we want to remove all ability to see price from anyone and then just control and maneuver the price book and then give, hey, here's what you can discount the retail.
Jack Carr: So even the techs won't be able to, are you saying that the technicians are not going to be able to see price at that time? the consumer needs to see it. So how is the text? Eventually going to see price just not when they're creating estimates, correct?
I don't know how that would work Okay, so we've talked about call center. You've revamped your entire sales process you brought in ryan Brought in packages
John Wilson: Realign team made sales managers. Absolutely massive change. Did the reorg, which was a big win for us.
Jack Carr: You implemented a call by call team this year, correct?
John Wilson: We got close to perfecting call by call. But we're about two years into call by call.
Jack Carr: Okay, but you made a big change to call by call though?
John Wilson: That was a part of our reorg. We had the call by calls report to the director of sales, and we created call by call pods, which we've done with basically every support function of the company now if a call by call was off, like sick or on vacation then call by call responsibility went to their ops manager. Now, if somebody's off, it goes horizontally to another call by call. the same thing happened with Dispatch, too, because we used to be trade specific dispatchers.
So if a dispatcher was off sick, it would float up. And now, because we made a dispatch pod, dispatch stays inside dispatch. we did that across five functions in the middle of our reorg. And it was a really big deal. But like a huge win.
Jack Carr: The hard part is getting it right.
John Wilson: It took us years to nail this down. once we got the idea of what the org chart could look like we did it in 45 days. we were losing traction. But now We feel like we're blowing it up again.
Big wins.
Jack Carr: Very cool. I know we talked a lot about data and how you measure wins and how you show wins to your team. What does that look like in your company now? And are the changes you made throughout the year big wins or just scraps?
John Wilson: the biggest win that we made on data was we got our accounting tighter. And by doing tighter accounting, we got to daily reporting again, which we now do, a very good job of. that was inspired by our good friend, Rich Jordan, he has a daily gross margin and daily revenue report, and that, we're about 90 days into, and that has been a mover.
Like our gross margin is consistently rising month over month, even during shoulder seasons, because everyone's looking at your gross margin every single day. So to give an example, like we're in November and November, the first part of the month was 80 degrees and we are still running at budget gross margin.
Jack Carr: Not much to there. It's one of those things that you say and it's really easy to say, but then the actual nuance to get, because we're going through the process right
John Wilson: It took us months. We're going through
Jack Carr: that process to try and get to weekly gross margin.
John Wilson: Payroll was the big nut. How do you get to daily payroll? That took a lot of work.
Jack Carr: Yeah we pay weekly, so I figured if we started at weekly, you can make changes on a week to week basis that drive versus, day's nice. I could see day being very helpful, but at least even for us, getting plumbing and HVAC separated,
Completely separating out the two gross margins so that we can go into that.
Separating out install versus service.
Jack Carr: The amount of work that takes it's huge. Huge amount of work. That's why we brought on full time staff to do that function. So that we can have that good data and use it to drive information.
John Wilson: Yeah, it's a big deal.
Jack Carr: Yeah, we were thinking about when we were talking with Rich about his break even point.
We don't really know our breakeven point. We have a range where we think it's in, but you can't get to that unless you really have everything else dialed in.
John Wilson: Yeah. And so you got to get your, you have to get your P and L dialed in. breakeven and then it's a lot. it took most of the year to get our data clean enough to present daily financials.
At this point, the way our daily gross margin reads, it's actually a little bit more robust than that because our data got so good. We have daily net margin.
Jack Carr: Gross margin, yeah, you can just chop up the recurring.
John Wilson: The big things that change are gonna be advertising, which we actually upload inside that daily gross margin tracker. We upload our month to date advertising spend so we know exactly where we're at to budget. We're pretty accurate. Yeah. So that's a huge, I think we were like 10 grand off last month in net margin, which was in the positive
Yes. But that was very close as a percentage of net, that wasn't a big percentage.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Okay. So huge changes around data. Yep. How you collect it, where you put it. Big wins there. Big wins. The last one that I had was those were the four big ones that I had.
Did you have any other ones, any big changes that we discussed?
John Wilson: Big one that we talked about about end of last year, and it took us a long time to implement it. I even think I gave an update in January of hey, this actually took a long time to implement. I would say we're not perfect.
I was at a shop that did a great job of it a month ago. I think that we're better than most, but we're not perfect. weekends added millions to our top line. . Like literally millions of dollars. So that did end up being a very big win. But it took a lot of work.
We had to create different shifts. We had to hire people in different ways. how do you staff the weekend? How do you call center? How do you dispatch, how do you call by call? it was very complicated. But the net result was about two and a half million dollars to $3 million just from those efforts.
And that's just since end of January.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that's a huge, talk about an organic boom, right? That's huge to be able to offer that.
John Wilson: had, calls we were already getting, we weren't able to service them until Monday. It was like captive demand that we basically just started serving.
Jack Carr: The relevancy of that, I would love to see from our listeners how many people are not doing weekends. We talked about initially as a hiring practice or an incentive is not, we don't have weekends are on call, but man, like you said, there's 4 million for you.
There's so much good money on weekends that we just have to throw away or not service. you lose water heaters, you lose furnaces.
John Wilson: It's who's available. Who has capacity. But it was a big win. And we're still iterating.
we're going to change how we think about our shifts. the big advantage to weekends from anyone I've talked to. is you make the shift really attractive. I've talked to people that do three twelves. So you get four days on your own.
Or I've talked to people that do a fireman shift, which is like three on, two off, three on, two off, you get to cover weekends and I guess people like that, it's a very forgiving schedule.
But you have weekends, and then you just get a lot of people that run that shift. Or you do four tens, which is how we do it. We do four tens, and you get three days instead of two. People freaking love it.
Jack Carr: People love it. We used to run it at the wineries all the time. I would switch every winery I moved to 410s because
It's a huge driver for hiring. Even 312s. There's people who would love to bust for three days. Just work hard, get it down, and then have the next four days off. That's huge.
John Wilson: I think especially if you have your family. That's how we're gonna start looking at it is can we do a three twelve.
Can we do like a Friday through Sunday or Saturday through Monday give you three twelves and we'll see you next Friday.
Jack Carr: I love it. That's a really good way to do it I think and in the long run, that's how the big guys in our area do it. Hiller does it there's billboards all over and it's hard to compete with.
Okay, so we have that as well any other big stones? Big boulders you did this year.
John Wilson: CSRs inside sales outbound, but I covered that inside CSRs data weekends. Vendor negotiations was big. We started nailing that down. I'd say we're continuing to get better.
Jack Carr: Do you have a number on that?
Like just a relative number of how much you think you've saved over the course of since we started that you've started vendor relations and really driving.
John Wilson: saved a few million dollars. And it's come from like the way we do it is every month we come up with a hit list. here's what we're going to go beat up and that hit list can be like we did our VoIP a couple months ago and we dropped it in half while staying on the same VoIP.
We just said, hey, this price sucks. We did Verizon and we went from 20 grand a month to six.
Jack Carr: Do it. Yeah, we have to. So this is one John, where both of us have done this and we pick one vendor. That's it. We pick one vendor per month and we go and ask him for a discount? Can you give us a discount? And the amount of discount you get is ridiculous.
John Wilson: It's crazy. Like you just start asking it's oh, yeah Actually, I don't really want to pay that. So what do you want to do?
Jack Carr: yeah We're just not gonna be on the service. We're gonna go somewhere else if you don't want to pay that we dropped Three thousand a month on one vendor and three thousand a month for us is huge So totally 3000 a month is huge to anybody.
John Wilson: That's a lot of money. we started doing this in January, February, and we've gotten more disciplined about it. The further we've gone, our overhead throughout the course of this year has actually dropped by around 100, 000 a month.
in that same time period, that we've dropped our overhead by 100, 000 a month. Our revenue is up like 60 percent from January. our highest month was 60 percent higher than January. So it's, yeah, it's a lot.
Jack Carr: Yeah. That's a big one. That one's an easy one too, that anybody can implement.
John Wilson: Yeah. And the easiest one is always cellular or software, just like, Hey, there are a million other choices, especially voice over IP or cell phone. There are literally so many other choices that if they say no, you can just find another one tomorrow.
Like it doesn't matter. Nobody cares if Verizon is whatever AT& T is great. It just doesn't matter.
Jack Carr: Yeah, and you go to your VOIP and say, Hey, we want, this to be half price. And they say, No. And you go, Okay. And then we say, Great. There's 100 other
John Wilson: solutions that are the same as yours, undifferentiated, that we can switch to.
Jack Carr: Yeah, we actually dropped our insurance this year from 100, 000 a year to 27, 000. Whoa. Cool. While tripling our vehicle count and headcount for workers comp.
John Wilson: Yeah we're gonna have, we expect to be that level of a drop next year in insurance.
Our insurance has been going wild so I'm going to spend roughly the next year, meeting with one insurance vendor a month and our renewal is October and we're going to establish relationships. We're going to go out to market in a different way and we think we're going to drop at least by half.
Jack Carr: I can't imagine that bill, it's 270, 000. Yeah.
John Wilson: So we'd like to get it to one 35.
Jack Carr: were there any other big changes you made?
John Wilson: A lot, but I feel like those were the big ones we talked about on the pod. This was a huge year for us and it's crazy because our budget next year is 34 million.
our stay in the 20 millions is going to be pretty short. It'll be sad. We'll wave in the rear views. But it's exciting because we feel like we knocked down all of the fundamental stuff this year. we set up a really good foundation for success. accounting got nailed. Call center got nailed.
We built inside sales. We set up weekends and the last two or three months has been us Finally reaping the rewards next year we continue to see momentum. we keep getting better on sales. We keep getting better at inside sales. We keep delivering more results.
I think it's just all the stuff we've talked about over the last year and a half.
Jack Carr: Which is really cool because that's like we, I don't know if the episode has dropped yet, but the Ishmael episode Ishmael Valdez, like that's what he talked about. That's what he said. He's zero to ten, it's hustle.
It's the hustle and grit. Yeah there's processes you have to put into place, but really it's hustle and grit. Ten to forty, it's locking in all your systems, getting everything lined out the way you're doing right now. And then 40 to 100 I forget what he said, because my mind doesn't even register 40 to 100.
But for those first two, that's what it was.
John Wilson: next year we're still, next year is still like a very block and tackle year for us. Hey, can we consistently offer good options? Can we consistently book the amount of calls we need to book?
Can we consistently keep the conversion rate roughly what we want it to be? And can we continue to develop our sales team? And that's all next year is for us. It's let's continue to block and tackle.
Jack Carr: Keeping all processes in place,
John Wilson: And can we simplify every position in the company to be scalable?
in 2026, that's when we believe expansion begins to really happen. And that looks like geographic expansion. by the end of next year, we will be mature enough to take on new markets. But right now, I don't think we are.
Jack Carr: Cool stuff.
Awesome. that is a huge list. And I think, from my big last question to you in regards to all this stuff is if you were to do it again, or for our listeners what do you think are some of the really easy ones that need to be implemented that not too much lift, they're easy, they drive huge amounts of results right away.
John Wilson: I really think the call center stuff and building an inside sales team, like that stuff is real. It does not take a lot of resources. You can do it easily. I really think those are the big ones.
Jack Carr: I think so too. Cause I think the call center, when we run into this issue every probably three months we get super good on three day call board and then something happens and then three day call board stops and now we have tech sitting around and then we get super good at three day call board again.
So this actually solves that issue in that there's really no Three day call board for service. It's just always going they're always outbounding always shooting for it And then our service managers do inside sales But I'm wondering right now based on the amount of offers that we have I think we could justify an inside salesperson.
I think that would drive big results.
John Wilson: Those would be the big ones. Yeah. stay tuned for the next year. We're going to be figuring out how to go from early twenties into our mid thirties here.
And I think it's going to be a totally different set of challenges Hey. We're building some processes today, but it is going to be, unfortunately,
Jack Carr: My hope, John is that there's a small group that listens.
Religiously to this podcast like that are on my size and that they're just following along, right? So as we're growing the tides rise all the ships in the bay as we run into new problems in the five to seven category Now they're going, Oh, we have these same five to seven issues.
And then the next year after 10 to 20, and then by then, in 10 years there's a playbook from, three to a hundred, two hundred.
John Wilson: Yeah. Hopefully.
Jack Carr: That'd be fun.
John Wilson: Follow along.
Jack Carr: Follow along.
John Wilson: Yep. Alright, thanks everybody for tuning in to Own and Operated. Check out OwnedandOperated.com if you want to hear more.
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