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Most techs aren’t salespeople—but they should be closing more jobs. In this episode, Jack and John break down the sales tactics that get homeowners saying yes more often.
We're talking about the difference between soft and hard selling, how full system evaluations can boost your close rate, and why most techs miss the real root cause of a homeowner’s problem. Plus, we cover the must-know steps for handling calls like a pro. If you want to turn more estimates into booked jobs, this one’s for you.
SPECIAL THANKS 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.
The team have been invaluable partners, helping us achieve awesome results with out SEO, PPC, 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.
SHOUT OUT TO HATCH
Turn communication into conversion with Hatch and its AI Agents, ready to handle follow-ups, reminders, email blasts, and more for your home service business. Save employee hours and book more leads with the power of Hatch.
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X
Owned and Operated #167 Episode Transcript
John Wilson: What are the steps of a call? A lot of techs do a really great job is like talking about the different options they have.
Jack Carr: We have spent under 50 percent of what we spent last month.
John Wilson: The fewest amount of human beings that can buy stuff within your business, the better.
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. And when I think about who was a huge partner for us, like 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. And one of our most strategic partners is going to be service dealers.
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 the top. Exactly where we want to be. So make sure you check out service scalers. com Sam and his team over there. It's just a bunch of killers. So thank you.
Service scalers for your partnership.
Jack Carr: Welcome back to owned and operated. We have John back in the building. What's going on, John? It's January.
John Wilson: We're doing okay.
Jack Carr: I'm having trouble taking John seriously at the moment.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, I look great. I, my wife told me about, my wife told me about this like thing that I can apparently buy contacts. for a lot easier than through my eye doctor. So I got my first set the other day and it came with these sunglasses that make me look like I'm 90 for free. And I am owning this look.
I'm really vibing with it.
Jack Carr: Next week I'll bring my, elderly shades in so that we can both rock them.
John Wilson: Yeah dude. I, feel like I look pretty good.
Jack Carr: There you go. January
John Wilson: 29th. Yeah.
Jack Carr: How's it treating?
John Wilson: Yeah. January has been okay.
So budget was 2. 4, I think, and I think we're going to land 2. 3
Jack Carr: or about the same. I think we'll be within 10 percent off a budget on just slightly shy over last year. over our break even, but not to expansion goal that we were hoping, that being said, not, angry about it, not angry about it at all.
So really happy, scared shitless though, going into February.
John Wilson: I hate February,
Jack Carr: is from a, financial standpoint. Isn't March is probably the worst month, though, not from a but from a cash flow cycle, right? Because all your bills from February hit in March. So technically I have four weeks before I, cry in the corner.
yeah, but definitely, yeah, not excited. It's, it has gone from three degrees to 60 degrees in a week.
John Wilson: Oh, whoa. That's crazy. it's still thirties here. So we still have a few more weeks of thirties. That would be nice.
Jack Carr: Yeah. No, we hit 61 today. So it's like nice and sunny legitimately yesterday. I thought that happened to us last year.
Might get our first no cool call. there's a chance that we bring in our first no cool. Oh my.
John Wilson: Yeah, that happened last year for us in February, 70 degrees in February. It was awful. And I'm deciding how to handle this.
but we, right now we have two budgets, which I don't know that I love. But one budget is the, hey, this is what I think is going to happen this year budget. which January is like 2. 2 million, so we are going to beat that, which is cool, but we also do a fulfillment plan every month and it's always going to be a little bit different because it's based on accurate staffing instead of budgeted staffing.
From a month ago, or like a year ago, and that is 2. 4. So I'm trying to figure out how to manage and celebrate wins. If there's two different goals, like we have the capacity to fulfill 2. 435 million dollars. Our budget is 2. 27 or something, which we will pass that. So it's like we, we did be budget missed fulfillment plan.
So I really don't know. It's confusing. I've asked other people about it and other people don't seem to be doing that. And I find them not doing it to be really confusing.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I don't have an answer for you. That's definitely somebody with a larger finance.
John Wilson: Nice
Jack Carr: ground. then my son,
John Wilson: whoever, if you're smart and you're listening to this, send us a message.
Jack Carr: Yeah, especially two point three. if you mess that up, that's a big difference.
John Wilson: January feels OK. February good, and bad. So we do this like cash out sheet. And cash, I was like, it's basically our cashflow projections and our cashflow for February looks really good. One of the interesting things that happens when you get, I don't even think it's when you get larger because it's as a percentage of dollars.
It's I think the same, but when you hone in on buying, you can get rebates and the rebates become ridiculous. for us, we have hundreds of thousands of dollars of rebates, which is essentially free cash coming in February.
Jack Carr: That's what we planned as well. we have, I think it's like 30k that's gonna hit from last year's rebates in February from a cash flow perspective, as well as we're selling a large piece of equipment that should hit in February as well.
I'm with you on that one. that's the planning that we undertook to focus on rebates at the end of last year. and then focus on, hey, when, are we going to close this, piece of equipment we no longer use out? let me ask you a question though. So this is purely selfish curiosity, plumbing, is plumbing also pretty terrible in February or does it save it?
Cause HVAC historically is absolute garbage. Yeah. Does plumbing help reduce that burden?
John Wilson: Yeah. Like plumbing fluctuates less. But does it
Jack Carr: kill a down month though, overall?
John Wilson: Tend, tends to be, but some of that is like days, working days, right? Like how many working days are in the month? This year, I actually don't think is that bad this year.
There's 20 working days in February. but there have been years where there's 18 or 19. so just from a working day perspective, it's just the shortest month, which for us we do 110, 000 a day. That's a lot. You lose a hundred grand because someone decided February should be 28 days.
The larger we've gotten, the more I've understood, people just running, arbitrary 30 day budgets instead of monthly. because it does feel a little bit more consistent.
And to change gears. But plumbing tends to be steadier. The standard objection that we start getting this time of year Is Oh, I want to wait for tax money.
Jack Carr: Yeah. No, we've heard that as well. I'm, very glad that the, Christmas holiday, season objections over because that one is rough to overcome.
John Wilson: Yeah. They all tend to slow down a little bit. Drains get slow when it's cold. so there's a slow time for drains. It does start ramping up in April. The ground gets really wet. Tons of downspout calls. Electric actually gets weird depending on if there's snow or not. If there's a ton of snow, electric is cooking because that ice brings power lines down.
but if it's too cold, electric stops dead because nobody wants to turn their power off because they're, that's controlling their heat. We had this amazing sales month. In January for electric, but the install is like 200 grand behind because we had this week in the negatives and nobody wanted to turn their power off because it's negative 20.
Jack Carr: You turn your power off for a day and you're absolutely frozen pipes.
John Wilson: Which is what happened. We had a ton of frozen pipes. Plumbing is just consistent. The, big thing that we work hard on this time of year is our conversion rate. We went into it heavy this year because we know Hey, we're going to have less at bats this time of year.
If you're used to running four calls a day, you're probably going to run three. And that's how this goes. We're going to really fight to get you those four, but that's our standard. So you have one less opportunity every single day. So your conversion rate has to cover that.
You have to be able to step it up. So we've been spending a ton of energy on increasing our conversion rate just to be better, but also focused on Q1.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I mean that, that's the big deal, right? Is if you're going to drop to three calls, you need to cover that somehow, and that covering is making sure that
you're selling higher average tickets, and then that you're actually converting on those higher average tickets.
John Wilson: And just from to dummy it down even more, if you're gonna see, if you're closing rates normally, 50%, four jobs a day, you sell two jobs a day.
If your closing rate is 50 percent and three jobs a day, you're only selling one and a half.
Jack Carr: what are you focusing on though?
Because, there's a few different ways that people look at it. They look at it from an average ticket point of view. They look at it from a percent conversion rate. Because, if you converted 100%, but that 100 percent is like average ticket of 190. What we tend to see And what we're trying to fix on our graph is as conversion rate increases, your average ticket is dropping.
And that's the opposite of what you want, right? You want your average ticket to stay steady and conversion rate to go up or your average ticket to go up and conversion rate to go up. And so we've been fighting that kind of from the beginning is, oh, this person has an amazing conversion rate, but yeah, he has half the average ticket.
Of course, it's going to be amazing, right? If you're giving away free this and free that, of course, the customer is going to quote unquote convert at a lower rate. So when, you're looking at that, how do you get the graph to go up into the right for both?
John Wilson: What we're spending a ton of time on is quality of options and pre setting the call and really like call by call management in, as a whole is built around this.
What I'm going to say is like sales 101 stuff, we might have even said on the podcast before. But it's all the little things that add up to that conversion rate. So the little things is like, Are we talking to the customer? Are we listening to the customer? Are we hearing what they want? One of my best examples of a terrible call is we do this secret shopping thing once or twice a year where we bring out a competitor, we secret shop them.
Hey, what are they doing better? What are they doing worse? We had a secret shop last year and funny enough, it was actually somebody we interviewed for a job. The tech that showed up. we, declined bringing him on. And this was like a month later, but it was just like a funny coincidence.
So anyway, this guy came in and it was to like, look at a toilet. hey, we're going to come in. We're going to go through the. the whatever, we get the options at the end, written on a piece of paper, and the options were like, toilet, which is why he was there, and then he had never talked about anything else, he just came in, looked at the toilet, he was like, great, I'm gonna, I'll come back with the price, he came back with this, so he's got the toilet repair, or toilet replacement, I don't think there's a repair, and then a water heater, She's which if if the customer asked you to look at it, or if you ask probing questions, like if you like did anything, I'm like, okay, he didn't even go in the basement.
That's the best. It was crazy. Like he didn't, he literally did not walk into that basement. He didn't even, he doesn't even know what water heater they have. And he gave them two, he gave them a water heater, like a 50 gallon and a tankless. It was wild. I, think in, my point in saying this is it's a lot of the little stuff that stacks up.
So how much time are we spending listening? Are we, asking like, Hey, what do you want? Us here to do like, why are we here? Hey, you're here to look at my toilet. All right, great. So we can repair it. We can replace it. We can upgrade it. there's three options. Awesome. And that company probably like us has a three option rule.
You can't leave without three options. But the problem is that those are like three fake options.
Jack Carr: and nobody's holding that tech accountable so that he's just slapping those options in there. And then some of them and it's written on
John Wilson: a piece of paper. Which I'm sure somebody got to save some money, but like that company doesn't even probably know what options that tech presented
Jack Carr: until the one thing that I will say if you start getting if you start doing this model and what we found out the hard way is, when your texts are giving BS options, because Yeah.
The customer starts calling in and goes, is this an invoice? Why are you guys charging me? Why am I paying? What is this about this and this? They start asking all the questions because they get an invoice or an estimate sheet. And the estimate sheet has, a water heater. And they said, we didn't, why is there a water heater on here?
So it's pretty easy to find out if your techs aren't doing the. the proper procedure. that being said, definitely. we've, gone through this before a few times, but making sure that the questions being asked are pertinent to the job at hand. Yeah.
John Wilson: Next door does, but so if you're in one of these other groups, they all have a version of this.
You can come up with your own too, but Hey, what are the steps of a call? So Nexstar has got the greet step, which is just Hey, what's up? I'm John. I'm here to check out your thing. The explore step is the second one. And it is important because it covers all this. We're like, Hey, let's go explore.
Let's look at the problem. Can you show me where the water meter is in case I need it? Can you show me this? Can you show me that? Can walk me through your issue? Why am I here today? and really like spending time trying to understand like, why did they spend, take time out of their day? Because then a lot of times they'll just walk you through it.
I was on a ride along last week, and, the guy I was with did a really great explore step, and all he really did was like, he's hey, let's go, take a look at the furnace, and, the homeowners, walked us through everything that was going on, and, he did a great job of explaining what his pain point was, and he was like, hey, I know it's old, When I called you guys, I was thinking about replacement already and the door got opened without us having to do anything.
now granted, it also was a cracked heat exchanger, and the hole was like, like little fist size. It was it was really scary, honestly.
Jack Carr: Yeah.
John Wilson: but it, was interesting cause that was a really effective explorer, hey, let's go together. Let's look at this and then as you're talking, you start building options in your head and those options should be relevant, but, that's how you increase conversion rate is you, just literally listen to what people want and then you offer them what they want, what they asked for.
Jack Carr: What's interesting there too, is that I find a lot. of sales. One of the keys to sales, which is missed sometimes with the technicians is, and we talked about this with, Joe C, I forget his last name. Cicero, Cicero. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. Service MVP.
Jack Carr: Yeah, he was talking about the entire emotional sale aspect, which made us reevaluate quite a bit of what we did, because there's an importance there, right?
That was also a great building rapport step, right? Yeah. They're sitting there, you're listening to the customer, you're actually putting what the customer wants, you're taking the time to make the customer feel heard. there's an entire emotional connection that happens between the technician and the homeowner versus the technician going, Hey, what's the issue?
Oh, furnace not working. goes downstairs by himself, tinkers, bangs some things, goes upstairs and goes, Oh, Kraken heat exchanger, we're gonna have to cut off your unit or you buy a new one.
Which is what happens a lot of times is, they skip this entire, Hey, asking questions. Let me hear what's going on with you.
What's your situation? What are you looking to do today? so very interesting. You did this right along. Awesome. The technician went through the options in his head. I'm sure he then flipped the unit, but on a non flip, maybe even a less kind of obvious, let's go back to that toilet example.
You have the repair, replace, upgrade. what are you having the technicians, what kind of questions are they asking to maybe open doors into other.
John Wilson: I think a lot of it. So on that same day, we, I just wrote along for the whole day on that same day, we went to a furnace with a weird smell. And we got there and it was a weird, it was a weird smell.
It's like, all right, this is weird. what do we got cooking here? And, he did a really great job. Just like asking probing questions. Hey, what room do you smell it in the most? what's the smell? Like we actually couldn't smell it at the time, when we first got there. And Hey, what's important to you?
And he did a good job of just like bringing up like, Hey, I'm not here to force anything on you, but this is an option that exists like this product exists. And it was a very like low risk way to present it. Now, I will say that there was some feedback I gave later, but it was basically like, Hey. Yeah, you've got a weird smell.
Here's, here's a couple things that we can do. And after I investigated the problem, it was a 50 year old humidifier that had basically rotted from the inside. There was a ton of mold inside the humidifier. valid problem. hey, I think we start with the duct cleaning. This thing's been blowing mold around.
Let's clean out the ducks. Sanitize them. You can either replace or get rid of that humidifier. But that thing does, if you want the smell to go away and you want to breathe clean air, that should come out of there. And finally, you can put the Cadillac thing on, which is this UV air purifier. And so like you've got a 700 option, you have a 1, 600 option and you have a 1, 500 option, which is the air, the UV light.
And she ended up, I think, 2, 400 later. She did the first two. And I think he did a good job. Now, I will say what a lot of techs do a really great job is like talking about the different options they have was really help can increase conversion rate after Hey, oh yeah, you can do this is you do eventually have to ask for the sale, which like, yeah, But it doesn't have to be intimidating because a lot of texts, I don't think it's hard selling. It's Hey, here's the options I presented. Which one do you want to move forward with?
Jack Carr: Yeah.
John Wilson: and it's just like that last sentence because it was funny. Like we ended up leaving that job where he did such an amazing job presenting options.
And I was like, we actually didn't ask for the sale. We just didn't say do you want to do this? We just left. It was like a weird way to end it. And then our inside sales team ended up closing it like. Couple hours later earlier this year. We started an outbounding campaign and we really didn't know where to begin So we were using dialing on the phones.
We were sending text messages We were trying emails tried a couple different softwares and ultimately we ended up with hatch has been an awesome partner for us We started with them about five or six months ago, and we just continued to ramp every month We had three or four more automations and my personal favorite thing about working with hatch is hatch comes out of the box Ready to go with hatch you get automated multitouch outreach across text, voicemail drop, email, and a ton more.
So every single lead that you have gets worked, every invoice that you leave gets retouched and rehashed, and it's freaking awesome. Check out usehatchapp. com slash o a o.
Jack Carr: I find that's a case in a lot of times where people have low, conversion rate is they don't ask at the end because they're scared of the actual close.
They're scared of the objection or the no, or how to overcome that objection. So if you're
John Wilson: used to flipping, which is what I've seen in HVAC a lot, Hey, I don't, have to close. I flip it to the comfort advisor, closes, but so they never gained that skill. Of like how to ask for the clothes because that is a skill.
Jack Carr: the clothes there is the flip and it's an easy because it's a zero dollar, right? You don't have to ask for money. You don't have to ask them to agree. You want to
John Wilson: talk to my teammate? Exactly.
Jack Carr: But at the same time, right? It's a different type of flip. It's a different or it's a different type of sale.
I still consider it, a decent close because you're getting to the final what you wanted. You did bring up some really interesting points. I'd like to round this out real quick it's interesting because when we talked to, Avoca, right? The, gentleman, do you remember Tyson?
Thank you. Tyson was talking a lot about how, or excuse me, it wasn't Tyson, it was Sebastian with Arilla. And we were, he was talking about, the best, comfort advisors. They ask questions, they slow down their cadence, and I find that once you're using the same type of tools and you realize, Oh, actually I should be asking questions.
I shouldn't be telling the consumer about this, and this. I should be really focusing on, Hey, what about this smell? It bothers you. Where do you smell it? Just like you were mentioning, it really ends up driving that point home and getting you closer to the conversion versus going in. I smell this and tell, you have to ask those probing questions to, make them feel heard and to.
John Wilson: It can be like softer than that. It can also just be like, Hey, what's the outcome you're looking for here? okay, I want the small to go away. Okay. After the smell, let's say we solve that. What do you want to do after that? do you care a lot about purified air? In this case, she had a newborn. So yeah, she did.
that's really important to her, but I think it can be pretty low lift and pretty almost like social over coffee. That's my personal way. Okay. to sell is just what do you got going on? I bet I have a solution. Let's talk about it.
Jack Carr: Yeah. And the other cool thing that I noticed from your story or your case study example was that what you ended up doing, which I feel like a lot of technicians miss.
And if you're having trouble getting to a point or where we had trouble specifically, I can't speak for every company where we had trouble getting. to a point, to offer was the issue was that not all technicians were looking for the root of the issue. yeah. for example, they show up.
Boom, it's a bad, or it's there's a leaking faucet in the house, right? We'll stay with plumbing. There's a leaking faucet, they come in, okay, you just, there's your repair place, upgrade on your faucet, boom, done, and they step out. In my mind, you missed the entirety of the issue. The issue not, wasn't necessarily that the faucet was leaking, it was that The PRV is bad and so the pressure on the house is 110 115 and we left.
Not only do we have a warranty on the back end of this because This is way over pressurized and it's going to leak again But b we missed the potential to do the right thing and have a win situation, right? Yeah, the technician wins because he offered the prv he makes more money the company wins because they generate more revenue and the consumer wins because they got Not only their leak fixed, but they got their pressure fixed so that the entire house is covered.
And what we implemented was called the full system evaluation, is we always focus on our, call by call managers are all focusing on what is the actual root of the problem. what causes that smell? Oh, you could just go and do a, I wave and a duck cleaning, but that wouldn't have actually solved the issue because you still have a old 50 year old humidifier, just like being molded into the house.
Yes, it UV sanitized and you wouldn't smell it because the I wave ions and all this kind of garbage. Yep. But. It didn't fix the mold,
John Wilson: right? Still mold.
Jack Carr: Do you use that full of value?
John Wilson: I'm thinking a lot about is obviously we do the breaking five workshop. You should check it out on an operator. com workshop.
nice plug, but thanks. What we are thinking a lot about. Is running a call by call workshop, because I think a lot of this, like a lot of this, how do we get to the root issue the way we solve this and coach on this is every single call, like you're talking to your and now you can graduate out of it, but someone else is helping you catch your blind spots, because even if you're the best I'm the world.
If you see 20 calls a week or 25 calls a week, you're going to have a blind spot on one or two of them. I'm like, Oh dude, I didn't even think about that. I didn't even think about the, Oh yeah, I came here to look at a foster. I wasn't thinking about the PRV. Yeah. I wasn't, or like the expansion tank or whatever just wasn't even on my brain.
I was here thinking about this really easy to get blinders on. So I think that's a big benefit of the, like having a type of call by call structure is because you are, someone is constantly. helping you along,
Jack Carr: especially like you said, it was negative degrees where you were last week. when you're running six or seven calls, the full evaluation always isn't at the top of the mind, but it's so important making sure, right?
Cause you, you walk out of the house, you didn't win. Even though you solved the customer's band, you band aided the customer's immediate problem. It wasn't a win and you'll be back there for a warranty on that same faucet most likely. The fact that somebody's there sitting with you actually making sure that, hey, did you check the PRV?
did you go through and find the root of why this was leaking? Did you check the other faucets to make sure they weren't leaking? Because that's the last thing that you need is to walk out of the house and then that one's leaking. They call you back. You fix that one. Then, they go, why do all these keep leaking?
And yeah, they call another company out and then now you guys are in. In trouble. So super interesting. I, a call by call workshop would be very, I probably would attend just for my own sake. I think it'd be really helpful. Yeah.
John Wilson: There's a few things we do that we think are like really unique.
People just have a ton of questions about them, but like call by call, the way we do call by call is very unique. the way we do this sales install model for plumbing and electric is very unique. Honestly, the way we do warehousing is very unique because the break, breaking five is obviously It's really good.
We're on our third one, like third sold out. that's really cool. I'm glad we're like helping people. That's cool. But, yeah, we're thinking about these last, okay, this is interesting. Sales and sales install models. Really interesting. Here's exactly how to do it.
Jack Carr: That's definitely. the, to circle back around, that is how we helped our team go from struggling and really trying Hey, what's this other, what do we add?
we focus on repair, refurbish, replace, we don't do that, and then maybe a premium option, but really it's questions. Hey, you're changing out this toilet. Are there any other toilets that are these little boys that you wanted to change for, different ones? sorry, John just put on his back is his, stunt of shades inside.
And but the, full system of valuations, what really helped us, how can you, truly do a service and build value for that customer?
John Wilson: And that's the explore. You can call it whatever you want, but that's like walking through all the stuff.
Jack Carr: Yeah. That's also how we hire too, surprisingly, is we try to make sure that the person has the mindset that they would.
Naturally do a full system evaluation. There's a lot of plumbers who we brought out and they said, oh yeah, we just, what? What do you do? You snake the drain and then get, paid and leave. And I'm like, no, Yeah, so
John Wilson: it's like root cause it's Yeah, root cause. Why? Why did it clog?
Jack Carr: And most of you know it, it makes sense to me, but for a lot of people it doesn't then. And what we found is our best hires have actually been people who have sat there and said, yeah, I'd probably check the drain after for roots or if it was uneven or if there was a break or something, because they understand that there's a cause and effect versus just, oh, snake the drain and go, right?
Yeah, you're missing something there.
John Wilson: Conversion rate, especially when there's less calls on the board is the ultimate. And I know for us, we've been really like honing in on over the past month or two, but we're spending even more time focusing on it now because there will be a little bit less calls in plumbing electric over the next couple months, or there's going to be more membership calls.
So we have to really hone in on like good listening, good options. is this something that they want? Is this something that they need? did they bring it up? How did it come about? Or did we just walk in the house and assume they needed a tankless, which is like what that one guy did, which is crazy.
Jack Carr: speaking of that big update, I know this is extremely off topic, but a couple months ago, we were talking about how we, or actually the first of the year, we were talking about how we implemented our no Charging or our techs no longer having access to credit cards or po's we had to do it through a purchaser on our team
John Wilson: Okay.
Jack Carr: Way purchasing from the front line. Love it and forcing them to utilize in stock what we already have We have spent under 50% of what we spent last month. Oh, dude. I know. Under 50%. I know. And, on top of that, so we, we spent 50% less on, cogs. but also, We are more revenue, higher revenue, half the spend, like it's so ridiculous.
John Wilson: It's so ridiculous. I remember, and I think the thing that blows my mind about this the most, and this is I don't know how to, I don't know if I, we need to do like a deep dive, like online workshop or something. Cause this is just people. Yeah, this is ridiculous, but we had the folks from Radiant down in Austin up here like two weeks ago.
It was Woody and a couple managers there and it was a lot of fun and they, their guys still had full access to supply houses. They're 60 million dollars and I'm like. You could shave off 200 grand a month of expenses if you just cut access. Yeah. If people can spend, they will spend. And if they can't spend, they won't spend.
And that sums up purchasing. So the fewest amount of human beings that can buy stuff within your business, the better. And I would say that is across the board. we're, right now, we did this in the field years ago. We're just now doing it administratively, where every dollar needs to go through a purchasing, agent for, office supplies, everything, because it's all the same thing.
And, we're probably going to save 20 grand a month. From, I believe it just like people not being able to just whip out a card. It, is a huge deal. I had
Jack Carr: to, do the update. I'm, yeah. I'm so excited to this. I'm glad it was a win, like already a win. And, not to only a win. Like sometimes it takes months to see wins.
Yes. Hey, we're doing this and it's gonna take six months. No, this was month one. Yeah. 50%. And I'm, looking at My, my inventory and stuff. I haven't even seen a dent in Oh yeah. Junkies. it's either theft or
John Wilson: truck stock. That's where it all goes. Theft or truck stock.
Jack Carr: And I think it just goes it goes to truck stock or warehouse stock.
Cause you don't have warehouse stock, but we have historical warehouse stock that we're trying to burn through. 50, 000, but if you have 50, 000 and it's supposed to be, 20 percent or 30 percent of 50, 000 in stock inside a warehouse, and it's supposed to be, 30 percent of whatever, each job, it's like equivalent to a million dollars that we'd have to sell to equal what we have sitting here that nobody's using because they're just going to Home Depot.
It's right there. So anyway, I'm off the horse off my pedestal. it's a big deal. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. I just wanted to share that when I'm really excited moving forward about this. And then we're going to start doing that as cutting back the managers that get that too, because I still see where the holes are.
And like you said, when,
John Wilson: The less people that buy, the more control you get over it. And yeah, it creates some headache. It will slow some stuff down. But I know for us, when we did it, We did save a million dollars that first year. It was 80, 000 a month in saved like overexpense and like people just buying whatever they needed.
oh, we buy whatever we needed and became truck stock and then disappeared or it went back to the shop and it became shock stock and then it became outdated and 80, 000 a month. Crazy.
Jack Carr: I was, I'm so surprised that I'm even allowed, yeah,
John Wilson: everyone's convinced their purchasing is tight. And then they.
Because if everyone can purchase, then everyone's going to buy. Just stop it. Stop it.
Jack Carr: And that's what it is. It's it just, naturally flows that way. So nothing to do with conversions, but super exciting win. Hey
John Wilson: man, quarter one, cash. Cash is cash, baby.
Jack Carr: That's why we're pumped about it because it's, we're actually like in a bad quarter climbing our way up already.
So that's a huge win. Super exciting.
John Wilson: Sweet. conversion rate, especially matters in Q1. Also, just outside of Q1, segue, if you want to hit up our Breaking 5 workshop, I actually don't even know how many more seats there are available, so I should probably check with Kristen before doing more of these plugs, but, check it out.
I think, I think we're in the 20s and we capped it at 30, but 20 some people, so it should be fun. This is the fun part of, doing it, this is our third one. so it's, fun. We have 60 graduates now, which is cool.
Jack Carr: The cool part too is like all these graduates come back and I talked to almost every one of them, not almost everyone, probably 50 percent of them fairly regularly.
Like Thomas, he's on the Facebook page quite a bit. Shout out Thomas. Yeah. Like he just texted me yesterday. He's dude, send me those Maverick pictures. I was like, Ooh, Maverick pictures. I love my Mavericks. So I sent them over to him. it's cool to have a, it helps build our community. I know they all talk to each other.
It's really exciting and I'm happy to do this third one.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. ownedandoperated.com hit the workshop button. It'd be fun. Thanks for tuning in.
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