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This episode of Owned and Operated features Chris Hoffman, CEO of the $130M Hoffman Brothers, continuing the "Legends Series," where industry leaders are highlighted for their massive influence and expertise in the home services space.
Chris shares his journey with John and Jack, scaling Hoffman Brothers from a modest family business to a multi-million-dollar industry leader, operating out of St. Louis and Nashville. The discussion covers business strategies, leadership challenges, and Chris’s opinions on what it takes to grow a home service business via financial discipline and talent development.
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Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X
Episode Guest:
Chris Hoffman: @STLChrisH on X
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Owned and Operated Episode 145 Transcript with Chris Hoffman
Chris Hoffman: If you're running our service business and you think you're going to compete on price, and that's your strategy to be the cheapest, that's the quickest way to go out of business.
Chris Hoffman: Financial discipline and commitment to the business. Focus on the operational basics, those playbooks that already exist in our space today. Get your hands on one of them and just start executing. Standardization, simplicity, those are guiding principles. Principles that every leader needs to be driving towards.
John Wilson: We're going on two years. I've partnered with service scalers to do our Google ads, PPC and SEO. And the results have been huge. It's been really exciting to watch as our website consistently jumps up rank as we're using more technology and we're moving faster than our peers who are all using legacy home service marketing companies.
John Wilson: We use service scalers for PPC, our local SEO. Our on page website SEO and our LSA. So give them a call if you're looking for leads. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today on the show, we have Chris Hoffman from Hoffman Brothers. Welcome, Chris. Hey, great to be here, guys. Yeah, this is this is gonna be good.
John Wilson: I'm excited to have you on. And we're going to be continuing on with our legends series with Chris today, which is basically the big boys of the industry. So really excited train.
Jack Carr: I'll pick up really excited to have you Chris. Yeah, we're interviewing some of the biggest players in the industry and obviously you being out of and doing an amazing job there and then moving over into Nashville.
Jack Carr: We'd really love to touch base on that and how I see your red stickers everywhere I go. It hurts a little bit, but at the same time, all the ships, you just need to sell,
John Wilson: just sell to Chris.
Jack Carr: I know. But honestly we really respect the business and what we hear from Hoffman in the area.
Jack Carr: It's very difficult to steal Hoffman customers. So
Chris Hoffman: the beauty of our space is in a market like Nashville, so you can have. Three or four hundred million plus pound gorillas. So
Jack Carr: plenty of room for everybody to win See everyone says that but it's much easier to say that when you are the hundred pound gorilla telling that To the squirrel running by trying to grab some banana crumbs But no, I do agree and we appreciate it
John Wilson: between nashville and your home location, which is more competitive
Chris Hoffman: I'll tell you, this is an interesting question because we actually share price books.
Chris Hoffman: The pricing strategy largely mirrors one another between St. Louis and Nashville location. But in Nashville, I'll tell you what, you see a lot of price dropping in these shoulder seasons. It seems like there's not like a there's not, pricing integrity is very fickle in Nashville where somebody who's selling
a
Chris Hoffman: system for 14, 000 during peak season will sell it for six during the shoulder season.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, we're trying to wrap our head around that because we as an organization philosophically, we just think it undermines our pricing, the integrity of our pricing. If we're that quick to discount shoulder season or otherwise. So we have some limits to discounting to make sure that we don't come across as a little bit silly, how deeply we'll discount.
John Wilson: We're going to dive into the history of Hoffman, but the. What has been in, so Cleveland is like a non owned market. So there's no like market winner yet, which is interesting. We're unique for MSAR size and we're starting to get interesting competitors. So like Aaron Gaynor from Eco, they're going to be sliding up to Cleveland at some point in the next year or two.
John Wilson: Chad is in Columbus. I'm sure Cleveland is on the radar at some point. And I'm honestly like looking forward to it. In a weird, almost sadistic way, because I think you want to, I think you want to know how you stand up. To some of the best operators in the space, like steel, sharpened steel.
John Wilson: And I want to know I want to know if I'm, good enough to meaningfully compete.
Chris Hoffman: I will also say this, that the competitors that I like competitors, like eco, if they came into St. Louis, the competitors I don't like are the Chuck and a trucks. Who might look like they're selling the same equipment as you because it's the same model and serial number, but just their quality of work is so much lower.
Chris Hoffman: They don't pull permits. They do. They cut corners. Those are the competitors. I hate competing against who just try and win on price and customers can't discern that their quality is garbage.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I was going to mention that when you mentioned the price dropping is we have a issue, especially in HVAC in Tennessee, where there's a loophole in licensure.
Jack Carr: And so there's a lot of people operating with either very minimal licensing or no licensing at all and getting away with it. Absolutely decimating. The price point in those off seasons, especially, but we see a lot less of it now that we're getting bigger because it generally the people who are calling the bigger companies are calling the bigger companies and the ones who are looking for the deals are Finding the smaller companies,
Chris Hoffman: Jack, and we can, I don't want to derail us too much.
Chris Hoffman: We can jump into history and whatnot, but just on the licensing thing. 1 thing we now have the privilege of seeing national and Saint Louis are on 2 polar opposite ends of the licensing complexity spectrum. Sure. Natural. As you just indicated, Jack is a. Contractor license statewide. We could hire 10, 000 people tomorrow to operate under our license throughout the state.
Chris Hoffman: St. Louis is one to one individual licensing, 10, 000 hour apprenticeships that must be tested and individually licensed for every single field pro showing up to every single house. Literally pull it opposite extremes, but the St. Louis model is as frustrating as it can be at times. It certainly has an impact on Some mode.
Chris Hoffman: Quality in the market training. It keeps it makes a lot harder to greenfield than a market like ST louis than in a market like national.
John Wilson: We jumped right in. I'd love to take it back a step or 2 and dive into the last decade really of your career running. Hoffman brothers.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, that sounds great. And I'll try and keep it to keep it somewhat brief, but I joined this industry. Like a lot of folks, probably like you, John grew up around this industry, right? I worked in it countless summers. My dad used to joke. He'd call us cheap. My me and my brother chief scrappers.
Chris Hoffman: I separate the different types of copper. And when we were using a sawzall to cut apart air conditioners so been around the business and have worn a lot of hats from call center, from high school through college, summer jobs, from call center to out in the field, setting condensers, hooking up disconnects, line sets, but it wasn't really until post college I joined the Marine Corps left the Marine Corps 2014 as a captain and then I, was talking to my dad about coming back into the business and, 1 thing that my brother and I feel super blessed and fortunate about is our dad is not the kind of patriarch who wants to maintain control and take the keys to the business with him to the grave. He was very quick to trust and empower my brother and I, and he really wanted our business.
Chris Hoffman: To remain a family business for the foreseeable future. And so the 3 of us put our heads together. There's a lot of alignment around our vision around what we could accomplish into my dad's credit is very quick to not only transition leadership, but give Joe and I a pathway to quickly transition ownership and he's still involved in the business today.
Chris Hoffman: He wears a project manager hat. He's on our sales team helps with complex projects, commercial projects. He's an engineer by background. Pretty uncommon. From in the 1980s, he went to trade school after he was already a mechanical engineer with a professional engineer's license and then jumped in a service van during the day.
Chris Hoffman: People in the 80s, I think, thought he was nuts. But he would say, that background together with trade school laid a really solid foundation for him and for our business when it came to quality standards. So 2014 we yeah. I left the Marine Corps in 2016 is when I finished an MBA program.
Chris Hoffman: And that's when my brother and I put our head together with our dad. And it was 2016 that we bought the business from our dad and jumped right in head first. I would say one of the key sort of inflection points early in that journey is we decided actually, I remember being on a call with, at the time it was a business coach named John Conway from XR Networks.
Chris Hoffman: John's a good guy. Yeah, now Redwood services, but John was on the, on this call and he was telling us how great next door was and how it would transform our business. And I remember being a little skeptical. And at the time, I thought I was pretty, I thought I knew my stuff. I was like, shit, I just left the Marine Corps.
Chris Hoffman: I got this MBA. I think I can figure this out on my own. And I almost made a terrible decision, which would have been to say, no, thanks. Next target out of here. But thankfully humility and the desire to learn won the day. And and we joined Nexstar in 2016. And I credit a lot of our growth over the years that followed to Nexstar network.
Chris Hoffman: And at the end of the day, businesses like ours, they're not, there's no magic bullet. There's no magic thing you can do to just make this thing grow. It's about doing the basics really well. And Nexstar has a process playbook, an operational playbook, which is That outlines what those basics are from what you do in a customer's home to how you assign priority levels to calls to how your dispatch team should manage the 500 calls that are on the board in a day.
Chris Hoffman: Pricing tools, you name it. So we just got that playbook and we started executing with rigor and that set off a really awesome growth trajectory went from 9. 5. 13 and a half to 18 to 23 to 30 to 40 to 56 to 80 where we end last year. We're 110 this year. We're short of budget. We're going to be 130 or so in there this year, but largely organic growth with the exception of the roofing acquisition.
Yeah,
Chris Hoffman: and what we did was just. Focus on the basics and just really leaned in heavily to that, that that playbook next door gave us. And I would say we also coupled together. We're trying to be really intentional around how purpose and values and a lot of those soft things show up in a business like ours because I candidly, I think having that compelling purpose values, I think those are the things that prevent culture, quality, and reputation from becoming casualties on the side of the road as you chase this ambitious 30 plus percent growth each year.
John Wilson: 30 plus percent growth is a lot. And so we've been 30 plus percent growth for a long time now. But it's different when you're doing 30 percent from 3 to 10. And even now we're in the mid twenties and we're at, we're like, we'll probably end the year mid forties. And it is a lot to manage.
John Wilson: And and I think about you often because I'm sitting here like I next year, like I want to slow down, but it's almost like, how do you slow down? Because I think momentum just keeps going, like how, I'm sure there's a lot to it, but how did you think about managing that?
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, we used to joke all the time.
Chris Hoffman: A couple things. One, growth is actually really expensive, and to do it in a healthy way. That's my first thought. It's that consumes cash. I think at our peak, in a single year, we bought six million dollars worth of trucks, right? After you upfitted them shelving, laddering, and it's eating your cash.
Chris Hoffman: So not only is it expensive in terms of the capital outlays you have to put in place, but the other way that it's expensive, if you're going to do it the right way and in a healthy and sustainable way is really have to lean into what I'll call some of your SG& A body, your overhead infrastructure, your people infrastructure, leadership infrastructure, whether that's it.
Chris Hoffman: Purchasing and customer experience and digital strategy and marketing, and all these, all the purchasing supply chain, all these other different functions that if you don't really make some people investments in those areas, they're going to become pain points in the very near future. And as a result, if you're keeping the toggle at this 30 plus percent growth rate you can see some margin compression happen from that because you're intentionally continuing to build the overhead body that your business needs next year and the following year and you're building it a little bit earlier just to make that journey a little bit smoother, a little bit less turbulent, a little bit more certain.
Chris Hoffman: And so that we always joke that well, maybe this will be the year that we should just slow down and we could have 22 percent even a margins and just pump the brakes and pause at 130. but I'll say this culturally. Growth and change and challenge into the opportunity that comes from it for promotions and advancement and new roles that's become part of our culture.
Chris Hoffman: And at this point, I don't think it would be really hard to slow this thing down and to culturally say, you know what? We decided not to grow this year. I think everyone would look at me like I've got three heads.
John Wilson: I don't even
Chris Hoffman: think you can,
John Wilson: I think it'd be the same thing internally for us. I think it becomes the culture like everyone's always looking for the next thing and it's not just you driving.
John Wilson: You have a hundred for us, a hundred, whatever you have 400, whatever driving. Yeah. It's I don't know. What was the biggest growth year percentage?
Chris Hoffman: I don't know. I'd have to do some math on those. I would say not. I would say we were remarkably in 2023 and 2024. We were below 30%. They were tougher years.
Chris Hoffman: They are tougher years. And there's even a disparity within our business this year around St. Louis is a large, stable 100 million dollar plus operation is growing at 9 percent this year. Yeah. The reason we're growing at a consolidated just under 2019 percent then. Is because of the national market, we're growing at 56 percent and because of our roofing acquisition is also experiencing really high organic growth.
Chris Hoffman: But so I would say at any point, it was really stayed between 30 and 40 percent and then 2023 and 2024 just been. More challenging environments no doubt about it. And we budgeted this year, our budget was like 34 percent organic growth across consolidated across all three entities. And and we're off.
Chris Hoffman: We're in 19. It's been a tougher year.
John Wilson: Yeah. That's a, it's a lot of growth. I know the challenges that I'm sure you've. Dealt with, but that we're feeling leadership's been a huge one cash. That's a huge one, just consumes cash growing and the, how do you create a good process? How do you create something that works when you feel like you're flying so that it doesn't break again.
John Wilson: And so just like taking the time you need while you also don't have time.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, leadership. That's been a challenge persistent challenge every year. And I would say it's only been exacerbated recently because is national was our 2nd market. Then we had this roofing acquisition.
Chris Hoffman: We've got another opportunity that we're looking to close on here in 4 weeks or so. Big business, big opportunity, big operation. And and the constraint continues to be within all of our locations and across the different businesses is we need folks who understand our process playbook who can execute it and ultimately who can take ownership of everything within their span of care without having to reach up the chain to ask for help all the time.
Chris Hoffman: And just that those caliber of leaders that can do that and exercise sound judgment and make good decisions for the business, for the team that is hard to find. And it continues to be a real challenge. We're trying to solve it a number of ways. Of course, we want to recruit externally when that makes sense.
Chris Hoffman: But we're also looking internally and saying who are really high potential rock stars. One of the the gentleman who launched Nashville and he's been instrumental in our transformation of our roofing business. He started with us and our plumbing underground team is a labor of busting up concrete right in basements.
Chris Hoffman: And now we found him. He was a really talented individual that was working at the front line in our business, and we were able to develop and pull him up through our organization. And I'm sitting here today saying, I have no doubt there's 4 more of them inside of our business. How do I find them? And how do I start pouring into them today?
Chris Hoffman: And so trying to be really thoughtful around how we're building that talent internally.
John Wilson: When you think about as a part of this series, what we've been trying to unpack is Hey, that's a hell of a journey, right? A hundred and
Jack Carr: 10
John Wilson: or 130 from 10. That's wild. When you think about some of the pivotal decisions through any point, but I would say, especially those early next hour, obviously would be one of the, one of the big ones.
John Wilson: What do you think those were? That 20 mark, the 30, the 40.
Chris Hoffman: I'll make a few comments on that score. Where I see a lot of operators, a lot of business owners go off the rails is as soon as they reach what I'll call like a moderate level of success, you get to 10 million and you made a million dollars in a year or a million and a half or whatever you end up making.
Chris Hoffman: And then you get comfortable and then you make substantial shifts in your lifestyle spend and all of a sudden, you're like, Oh, You're sucking cash out of the business that it needs to continue to march down that, that high growth path that you had originally thought you wanted to go down. And I can say for the first four years in the business, I don't think I changed my salary.
Chris Hoffman: Is it like 85 a year? That's all I paid myself, right? Even as we passed 30 million paid myself that same salary. And that was at, it was in there at a truck from the business but it was financial discipline and commitment to reinvesting in the organization and putting your money where your mouth is.
Chris Hoffman: And going all in because to scale quickly, it does suck up capital, particularly in those early years. And in those early years are also when banks would be hesitant to Lindy. Anyways, it banks get a little skittish around a 5Million dollar HVAC business, or even a 10Million dollar HVAC business. And so it can be hard to access bank.
Chris Hoffman: Financing to support your growth. So you really need to make sure that you've got a commitment to reinvesting and growth. The other thing I would say is don't think you have to reinvent the wheel and don't think you're smarter than the thousands of peers who've gone before you. I preach a lot about next star and say how great it is.
Chris Hoffman: There's a lot of other organizations like next star. But the point is, go learn from those who have gone before you. And don't think that you're going to go figure it out on your own and you're somehow going to do better than the collective wisdom of these thousands of contractors who contributed their knowledge to these playbooks that exist out there.
Chris Hoffman: Financial discipline and commitment to the business and focus on the operational basics that those playbooks that already exist in our space today. Get your hands on one of them and just
Jack Carr: start executing. That's great. The John, actually we have an episode on that specifically on reinvesting in your business.
Jack Carr: And you said something incredibly similar to what Chris is saying right now. It's wild from a third party to actually hear both of you fairly successful in the same exact same.
John Wilson: Yeah. I, my salary was a little bit more modest, but I think we start, we were a little bit smaller. When I started, but I paid myself 65, 000 until we crossed 15 million and then I upped it slightly, but yeah, it's a modest house.
John Wilson: Don't have a lake house. Cause I think the thing that mattered what I joke when I tell my wife is I'm a simple man. I don't need a boat. I don't need a Lamborghini. I need to build a hundred million dollar business. And that is literally it. I'm a simple guy. Yeah. But yeah, I think I, I agree.
John Wilson: We, I usually see it like earlier on, not even that flow to the owner. I feel like I see it a lot at the three to five, like they make their first 200 grand and they were a technician in a truck once. And now they've got a boat and a lake house and a 90, 000 pickup. And they're like, I'm good.
John Wilson: I'm good now.
Chris Hoffman: And not to mention the time you're spending on that boat and at the lake house that's, I can tell you in those first four years in particular, thankfully I didn't have kids at the time too, but there wasn't a lot of time for other hobbies, right? If you're really leaning into executing on that high growth, What's your time look like now?
Chris Hoffman: What do you,
John Wilson: What does your day to day,
Chris Hoffman: It's, it shifted in February when a gentleman, Matt Wyatt came off of our board. He'd been on a board for 2 years, a phenomenal leader. He spent 20 years in the Air Force before retiring as a colonel. And he led the 1st Department of Defense TEDx speaking series when it was at Scott Air Force Base.
Chris Hoffman: A local CEO happened to be there who at the time was running a $700 million manufacturing technology business, and he recruited Matt. This was in 2014 2013 to join his company here in town called Perry Waymiller. Matt joined in a role that wasn't quite defined, but this leader, Bob Chapman, knew that he needed somebody to really help him lean into this leadership development piece.
Chris Hoffman: To make sure they could scale their organization in a healthy way. And so Matt spent 10 years, they're really as they went from 700Million to 3. 5Billion and acquired another 150 companies over that period of time. And Matt was at the tip of the spear with respect to how they were leaning into their people strategy, leadership, development, integration work.
Chris Hoffman: So I asked him to join our board as we were entering this next stage of growth, and he's been just a really impactful contributor. And when I thought. In 2000 or in February 2024 this year, I was saying, man, I need, I think 1 of the things I take pride in is I want to be able to recognize when I'm no longer when I become the constraint when I think there's someone that could do my job better than me.
Chris Hoffman: I want to get out of the way. I joke about firing myself 7 times over the last 8 years because I'm firing people who are going to do a far better job and have a far greater business impact on the span of care that I give them that I take for me and give to them. And this was an example where I thought Matt's experience, what he's bringing to the table is going to allow him to propel our business forward.
Chris Hoffman: As we think about this next stage of growth, which will include a much more acquisitive growth and really excited at some of the things that we're working on there. And hopefully we'll be able to announce soon, but. It's been a ton of fun. So my day looks a little different. I've been spending a lot of time helping with our pipeline building efforts in there.
Chris Hoffman: We're resetting our board now to bring in some different perspectives based on what we think the voices we think we need to help us execute on this next 4 or 5 years. But I now have 2 folks in my span of care where I used to have 7 or 8. Matt and our CFO are the 2 folks in my span of care, and I try and work through them and allows me to focus externally on how we're we're guiding our organizations, how we're allocating capital across our our sort of global balance sheet and business and be a little bit more strategic and a little less tactical in my approach.
Chris Hoffman: But. I will say, and I'll shut up is whether you're in my seat or Matt seat or any 1 of our leaders. We have this mantra around having a frontline obsession in our business. And that shows up. That means that I'm spending time doing ride alongs, staying connected to what the people are doing. What our people are doing who are serving our customers right there with the rubber meets the road.
Chris Hoffman: And so I think. No matter how deep our structure gets and how many layers there are to it. I hope to always remain really focused on what's happening at the front line and making sure that I'm spending time there to see it with my own eyes.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that's a great point. Do you mind speaking on how you came about?
Jack Carr: So I think in industry, anyone who knows Hoffman brothers and knows you knows the focus that you guys put on culture, right? You guys don't do weekends. You have amazing benefits that are extremely hard to compete with. Just across the board, the focus on your internal customers, what I call it, that you're employees, the front line, where and how was that decision made to Have that intent and that focus.
Jack Carr: Where did that come from?
Chris Hoffman: I think it starts with my dad. My dad was, if Joe and I, my brother and I hadn't come into the business, it was my dad's intent to candidly just give his 10 million business to his, four or five senior leaders had been with him for a long time. And he was always just very generous and he wanted, I think he derived the greatest satisfaction, not out of what he could consume himself but out of what he could do to impact others quality of life.
Chris Hoffman: And and so we, when we started on this path, like at the beginning of the Nexstar journey, there was, what we've done a good job of trying to do as a business is connect the dots between. Our company's ability to win and how that the financial results that we achieve and how that impacts our ability to provide great outcomes for our team members who in turn need to deliver great outcomes for our customers.
Chris Hoffman: It's that circle, right? This is nothing new. And so we were very intentional, particularly when we were rolling out the next our playbook to say, hey, If you can buy into this, I know this is a lot of change. It's harder. It's more difficult. We're asking you to learn something new. But if you can do this and execute it at the level we're asking you to, that's going to allow us to do things like provide free health insurance for you and your family.
Chris Hoffman: Which is almost now with our renewal is just 11, was it 11. 9%, right? We're now paying close to 20, 000 per person for family coverage. We pay 100 percent of the premiums, but we're able to do that. We're able to have the 8 percent 4 1 cash 4 1 match. The 9 paid holidays, up to 20 pages, also 29 pages off a year for a lot of our team members.
Chris Hoffman: Big investments in tools, training, Hoffman Brothers University. All those things, right? It's only because we're creating great results as a business, right? That we can pay for those things. And that relies on our team buying into the processes that we're delivering. And of course, they're trusting that we're going to take really good care of them.
Chris Hoffman: When they execute on those things. And at the end of the day, the last thing I'll say on this is it is a losing battle. If you're running our service business, and you think you're going to compete on price, and that's your strategy to be the cheapest that's the quickest way to go out of business.
Chris Hoffman: It's just a race to the bottom. That's a brutal journey. We don't want to be the chief. As a matter of fact, when people call us, the last thing I want them to think is call Hoffman Brothers. They're the cheapest. I want them to think call Hoffman Brothers. They're the best. Their integrity is beyond reproach.
Chris Hoffman: Their quality of work is amazing. Their professionalism is awesome. The way they communicate with me is unlike any other service provider. And if we do all those things really well, people happily pay a premium for that kind of experience. And that's where we try and play. And to play at that level, we need to have premium talent, right?
Chris Hoffman: And then our strategy around compensation and benefits needs to align with our desire to have premium talent. And so that's the, how we think about it and how we try and position our business and how that informs our approach to people. Cool.
John Wilson: I don't know that I want to say opposite approach, but it's close.
John Wilson: Two of the other legend guests that we just had on Tommy Mello and Chad Peterman, where they went multi location pretty early and they did, they, I think both of them around 10 to 15 million. I know Chad was 15. I don't remember exactly Tommy's, but whereas you stuck in your principal market for A lot longer than that.
John Wilson: 70, 80 million. And then you went and greenfielded and now you're going to acquisition. So I'd like to unpack each of those. Cause that's three like very different things that we've talked about with anybody so far. So in the first one, walk us through it. That's different. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Hoffman: John. So if you pull up your service Titan and you look at your heat map on, where your revenue generation by zip code, if I do that in St.
Chris Hoffman: Louis, I see that the bulk of our a hundred plus million dollars comes from like the same fricking zip codes and the same parts of St. Louis. So what's easier me to go pick up and buy a new building, find a new leader start building a brand in a market where our brand doesn't exist. Or to say, you know what, see these zip codes over here where there's 200, 000 people and we're not doing, we're doing a million dollars of revenue.
Chris Hoffman: Let's go penetrate there. And so my thought is I personally think everybody has different strategies, but I think for some people, I'm not saying this is Tommy or Chad some folks. I think ego leads them to say I need a 2nd location. I need to be multi location. I want to be in 5 states and it's look in your draw 40 mile radius around your office.
Chris Hoffman: And where are you not penetrating within your existing service area? And guess what? It is a lot easier to go penetrate in those areas than it is to say, we're going to go launch new three or four or five or six hours away. So that was our approach. That's why we didn't open a new market until we were, whatever it was, 60, 80 million.
Chris Hoffman: I forget what the number was, but we had a lot of room in
John Wilson: Those core markets. Yeah. We feel like we've been challenged on this recently because we're in Cleveland. So Cleveland, big market and a very like geographically spread market. The top to bottom is 90 minutes and we're roughly in the middle.
John Wilson: It's an interesting problem because as we think about we have exactly what you just said. So 45 minutes away, 50 minutes away there's zip codes that have. Exactly what we're looking for in a customer base, good population, good good income, good, really, everything that we would want, but it's 50 to 60 minutes away.
John Wilson: And if we were to follow the model that the last two legend guests have talked through, then it would be popping up a location because it's an hour away. We would place it there, we would run, and we ran multi location for years, so we have a really healthy respect for just how difficult it is, even if you're just an hour away.
John Wilson: It is difficult. So we're doing our best to figure out how we can run 40 to 60 minutes away or even 70, 80 out of one location and just dispatch better or use tools better or somehow how do we fulfill an hour away and how do we build a membership base there? Is that a challenge that sort of resonates with what you guys had to go through?
John Wilson: If you need help with your overseas hiring, let me tell you about my friends at Sagan. For years, we have been hiring overseas team members. In our call center, accounting, and marketing, we've typically run this discipline ourselves, but the more we hire, the more complicated it's gotten, as we started to add deeper expertise hires, like hires in accounting, in AP and AR.
John Wilson: We called up my friends at Sagan, and we said, hey, here's what we're looking for, how do you guys think you can help us? And they were awesome. The thing that I like about their model is it is a monthly retainer instead of this giant 30 to 50 percent of the first year salary of whoever that person is that they hire.
John Wilson: So it's this monthly charge, they hire X amount of candidates a year and it's been really good. We just hired our first two a couple weeks ago and they've already been awesome. They're jumped into the accounting department. Check out Sagan Go, which is S A G A N Go dot com. For more information.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah. Let me ask you this.
Chris Hoffman: So if you had a 200 million business today, would you rather have 10, 20 million locations or 200 million? Oh, I would rather have two. I would rather have two. Yeah, for sure. That's a choice and that's a choice. And you can choose that because it's expensive to Greenfield. I think we. We spent three and a half million dollars cash out excluding the real estate purchase before we started returning cash to the mothership from a our launch in Nashville.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah. And three that's really expensive. Imagine the market penetration I could get. Inside of St. Louis, had I said, I'm going to sell 3. 5M dollars at a customer acquisition strategy in there. Not that you shouldn't greenfield in our case I think we're going to reach a saturation point in a market like St.
Chris Hoffman: Louis. I think we could get to 150 or 200M there, but I think we're going to see the growth rate slow. So we need to get our foothold in these new high potential high growth markets so that we can sustain that 30 plus percent. Consolidated growth rate but it's expensive and I think I think oftentimes folks should really take a hard look in their own backyard before they, they say, I'm going to go take this plunge a couple hours away.
Jack Carr: Also
Chris Hoffman: you did a really good job with
Jack Carr: the Greenfield too. There's other people who've Greenfield in the Nashville that had to sink significantly more money and for less results. I think that's something that's obviously overlooked as well is that 3 million for the listeners was a very good job.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, in terms of the return. To build on that point, Jack but it's a different game. So if I'm private equity and I won't name names, but 1 gentleman told me that he'll spend CEO, 1 of the big platforms for me, he'll spend 20M cash out to build a 25M brand in 36 months. And that math works for him because that 25M brand, if it's doing, 15 percent EBITDA margins at, 3.
Chris Hoffman: that's going to trade at 15 times under his mothership brand, whatever that comes out to 50, 55 million. He did, if he spent 20 to get there, he just created 25Million dollars of enterprise value, even though it was like a super inefficient use of cash that math pencils for him. But for me, as someone who's committed to private ownership for the next few decades, I That doesn't pencil for me, right?
Chris Hoffman: I don't have 20 million burning a hole in my pocket to go build a 25 million business.
Chris Hoffman: And so we spent three and a half to build a 15 million business. So if you look at the efficiency of our cash outlay compared to theirs I think we're being better stewards of our finite resources.
Chris Hoffman: Definitely.
John Wilson: Yeah. We, were you dispatching in my scenario of an hour away? Is that how you were handling it, or is St. Louis not that wide? Like, how do you geographically spread without the pop up locations? When I say geographically spread,
Chris Hoffman: St. Louis, we serve end to end of our service area. It might be 90 minutes that we'll drive.
Chris Hoffman: It's roughly a, take our office, which is in the heart of the county, and maybe draw like a 40 mile radius. around it is roughly roughly where we serve. And in there, St. Louis is a big, sprawling metropolitan area. 3 million people, 625, 000 households in the MSA. But it's very spread out and there's just a lot of room to penetrate in that.
Chris Hoffman: That sounds
John Wilson: almost exactly like Cleveland. Yeah, it's just a wildly large area. 4 million people, but there's so in St. Louis, like there's,
Chris Hoffman: I would say just like Murfreesboro is to Nashville, like Edwardsville is to St. Louis or Wentzville is to St. Louis. And there's all these like vibrant communities that are at the edge of St.
Chris Hoffman: Louis, that might be 30 or 45 minutes away that we don't have a lot of great penetration in, but I don't need to build a new warehouse and a whole new infrastructure leadership team to serve them. And I just think that's the easy place to lean in for a lot of businesses. before jumping elsewhere.
Chris Hoffman: And just drive further, drive a little further. And if you get enough people in a big enough team, I've seen some folks operate in like zones, especially if you're in an MSA. That's what we're preparing
John Wilson: to do is we're going to be zone dispatching for profits because it's, we have people that live in those areas and they drive an hour to work, but it's like far from the warehouse, but we think the way that we sell and fulfill should be able to do it.
John Wilson: But conventional wisdom would be. Do a location, but I really don't want to do another location.
Chris Hoffman: The thing was zones that I would wrestle with and I'd be interested in how you solve it is what you want to make sure is in every zone you have every kind of technician, every kind of field pro you're going to have your selling texts, you're going to need to make sure you have all the repair texts.
Chris Hoffman: You have the right skills for all those different things. You're going to need maintenance tax. So if you don't have a deep enough bench to make sure that every zone has the right. Mix of talent serving it, then you could find yourself in a situation where, Oh, shoot in zone C. I don't have a single selling tech and I'm getting a lot of 10 plus year old breakdowns, but I'm sending folks who flip 4 percent of 10 plus year old breakdowns.
Chris Hoffman: What am I doing? I'm shooting myself in the foot.
John Wilson: Yeah, I think the way. So the way we work is almost everyone's selling tech. So our plumbers they'll, I actually think it works really well for this type of thing. So they're going to drive around in a pickup and they'll have minimal parts to do small repairs.
John Wilson: And if it's above a Depends on the trade, but it's either 500 or 1, 000. Then they send an installer to follow them and complete the work. In some ways, it's less efficient if it's a small job because it's two visits to do a 1, 000 invoice. But in, we found that It's a lot less reschedules for the customer.
John Wilson: We're on time more. And then technicians that are really good at talking to customers and presenting options are often not the technician that's really good at having no callbacks. So we divided that pretty early on. So when we think about, new market, even if I did put a pop up location an hour away, the way we were going to put that is all I need is three techs and then we would run fulfillment installation out of our home branch.
John Wilson: Because I can just send a pickup anywhere. So it's Ford Rangers and Tacomas.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, that's an interesting model. I hadn't contemplated our service pros, like they'll self perform any of the work they sell. They won't sell new equipment. But to your point, I could have one of my best selling techs who the customer chooses option B, and all of a sudden they're replacing a compressor, and they're there all day versus going to the next call.
Chris Hoffman: That's an interesting model. We haven't really, Messed around with building like the text that can help execute the work versus that are better building options. And yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of that.
John Wilson: Yeah, we did it in 2018 and I think it solves this where we can basically deploy these, pick up truck technicians that can solve the small stuff. They have pack outs for truck stocks, so we don't really have to deal with that very much. And then if it's big, then they just ship it off and install. Does it same day next day? Yeah, that's great. So hopefully that works now. We don't do it that way for HVC, but we do it for that way for the other trades.
John Wilson: So when you were going from well one, 80 in one market or a hundred in one market is obviously like very large we've talked to Yeah, Mike Barnett Yeah unfortunately, I'm gonna edit that part out but He's a good guy. I was talking with Mike And they were describing how they felt like So their plumbing is only growing 3% Year over year.
John Wilson: So it's slowed down a lot, but they're, Columbus is still growing in general a lot because they've added hvac. So that's been the, that's been the catalyst. So maybe they'll get up to a hundred. How, and you seem to think, I mean you said 150 to 200 million in one market. That's a lot. When I think about, I can think of two operators that run 200 plus million in one market four Seasons.
John Wilson: And who's the guy in Phoenix Park stance? You Parker. Yeah. I can only think of two that run 200. Is there a third one for me to
Chris Hoffman: teach me?
John Wilson: No, man. No. I'm like, cause I think ABC is 80 or Gettles biggest is 80 or 90 in Vegas, right? In Atlanta. How big school
Chris Hoffman: rain Atlanta. That's a big brand. I don't know what they are.
Chris Hoffman: I
John Wilson: don't know. I actually thought there was, I thought there were 70
Chris Hoffman: issues that are like 100 to 150, but the 200 plus 200 is a lot.
John Wilson: Yeah. And the markets that have 200 are twice the size of St. Louis. So I'm not really Hey, you can't do it. I'm just like, walk me through it.
Chris Hoffman: We've done, I don't have it in front of me and it's been probably 18 months, but you can do some work around what is, what's our market share here in St.
Chris Hoffman: Louis? And the last time we did it, we pegged ourselves at seven or 8 percent in HVAC. It varies by trade,
but you
Chris Hoffman: can make some assumptions around number of households, how frequently they replace their HVAC systems at what average ticket, and you can like roughly size the HVAC replacement market.
Chris Hoffman: In, in our world and like we're single digits still. So I think you can do it. It's just a matter of like, how deep can you penetrate? Cause if the total market's a billion dollars a year in St. Louis, can one company get 20 percent of that? Maybe it's freaking hard. It's a hyper fragmented space.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, maybe.
John Wilson: Yeah. I remember I don't think it's Len the plumber. But there's some company in the Northeast that like one in three houses has their membership program. Do you know, do you remember their name? Horizon maybe? Would it be Horizon? It might be, but it was like, cause that's probably the most extreme example of the share that one company can take.
John Wilson: Greenfielded into Nashville. Why didn't you just keep greenfielding? Why did you buy the roofing company? Okay. Great
Chris Hoffman: question. A couple of thoughts on the greenfield. One that takes a unique local leader to go from 0 months like that. And I don't have unlimited numbers of those leaders sitting on the bench.
Chris Hoffman: 2 is it's a slower path to growth. I always like the idea of burning a greenfield having that running. It's a cash out endeavor, right? Every time you launch one, it's starting a three to four year cash out endeavor before it starts returning cash. So there's that to contend with. I wouldn't want to have three going at once just cause it's, that's just a big cash burner in there.
Chris Hoffman: But I would also say we're getting to the point where as we generate cash, we need to find more good homes to deploy it in support of our growth and. If we're only going to burn 1 greenfield at a time, right? Have 1 of those going at a time, then we've got to find opportunities to deploy it elsewhere in our business.
Chris Hoffman: And I don't want to just pour it into organic grow marketing spend in Saint Louis because I think there's diminishing returns on that. If you start to just. Keep pouring it in and trying to buy market share that way and candidly, I'm starting to see a lot of folks. I've been shocked at the amount of inbound we've had from folks, particularly founders who have held on this long and haven't sold because they don't want to sell the private equity.
Chris Hoffman: They don't like what it stands for. They've heard horror stories about what happens when that goes wrong. And there's folks now that we're putting up the flag saying, hey, we're interested in being a potential acquirer of choice for a lot of these folks. We're getting a lot of outreach, and so we've been able to be really selective around who we're engaging with and how we're thinking about partnerships.
Chris Hoffman: But that's open the door. So roofing, we think that's just a really exciting space. A lot of similar industry dynamics, a lot of industry tailwinds. I think that the model is not that dissimilar. Some things are much easier. And I think there's a lower level of sophistication throughout the roofing space today that allows some early entrance to experience a lot of growth.
Chris Hoffman: We won't I said, we would double our roofing business in the 1st, 12 months that we owned it, but we're going to be a little short of doubling. We're going to be we're going to be close in there. And it just, I think it shows the opportunity that's in front of you in that space. Now, I like to acquire in the plumbing electrical arena, and we've just been selective on those opportunities.
Chris Hoffman: We have 1 that hopefully be able to share here soon, but. Really exciting. Good opportunity. Good business. And if we do this the right way, I just think, some of these partners we look at, they're great, sizable businesses. The 1 we're looking at here shortly, hopefully be able to announce is close to 30 million dollars or so.
Chris Hoffman: And there's just so much opportunity synergies and otherwise by integrating these businesses. And there's so much cultural alignment. They're positioned the same way. We are. It's just a high quality, high touch provider. Longstanding business in the market. They care a ton about their people, and it's just a partnership designed to win for everybody.
Chris Hoffman: And I think we bring a unique flavor to our partnership structures and not to go too deep on this. But I think we get really creative and cool and how we structure operating agreements. So we bring these partners on and say, we're going to buy 75 percent of your business. You're going to keep 25%.
Chris Hoffman: We're going to give you this formulaic redemption approach to redemption on how you can exercise a liquidity option on your remaining interest. And it basically says in the operating agreement, we define at what multiple we're going to allow them to sell the remaining interest. And then we fund within 90 days.
Chris Hoffman: After they after they give us notice after a 3 year lockout period and they have the ability to say, you know what, I want to hang on for the next 20 years with you and be a partner with you, or they have the option to say, you know what, after 5, I'm ready for that 2nd check because we've grown like crazy.
Chris Hoffman: And if you look at that roofing brand what a cool story. That business is going to 2X its EBITDA in year 1 and the owner there, I'm sure is excited to be along for the ride. Man, look, what's what the potential is. I want to do this for at least another 5 and see what happens. And same thing with this.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah. This next opportunity we're looking at, that's gonna be a huge opportunity where I would love it if we could take them from three of even out of six and 12 months. But I think those things are very real possibilities when we're looking at the skills we can bring and how those line up to the opportunities that exist in these potential partner businesses.
Chris Hoffman: The other last thing I'll say is I just want to be very thoughtful about how we do it. Because some of these consolidators, I won't name names and bought, I think at a high one, bought 40 brands in a single year for zero. Like you tell me, I think Apex
John Wilson: did 50. I thought they did a hundred at one point they were doing, dude, they were doing two a week.
John Wilson: I met with I met with him. Yeah. What was that guy's name? It's a different CEO now, but I met with the then CEO. We were at some event together. Yeah. And it was like, he's we're going to do, we've been doing two a week. And I'm like, that is insane.
Chris Hoffman: I go back to our approach when we're buying businesses is we're not just buying them and setting them on a shelf and saying, do the same thing you've always done.
Chris Hoffman: I want to be able to thoughtfully integrate, add value, create synergies. Like I'm truly creating an integrated platform. And right now I only have the bandwidth. I can't buy two 30 million businesses at once. I wouldn't because I don't think it'd be fair to the partners that I'm partnering with and what I'm saying I can do to add value to them.
Chris Hoffman: If I bought two, I would not deliver on that commitment. I would be short selling each of them. So we're going to be very thoughtful in our approach and we're just going to make sure that every partnership that we do is a fricking grand slam. And we're going to, if that means we only do one a year. Fine.
Chris Hoffman: If it means we can do two, great. And I think that'll change over time as we build more integration team
Jack Carr: infrastructure to support
Chris Hoffman: that effort.
Jack Carr: And are you looking at additional verticals or are you sticking with kind of as roofing? HVC plumbing. That's it.
Chris Hoffman: We're staying in that box for now.
Chris Hoffman: That's not to say I wouldn't be interested in some homes, parallel sort of home service tracks. I like pest control, foundation repairs. Interesting. We're doing some stuff in pool service just as a minority partner. So I liked a lot of these other spaces, but I also don't want to check, get the shiny object syndrome.
Chris Hoffman: I want to master, I want to stay in our lane and there's a lot of opportunity in HVAC plumbing, electrical and roofing, tons of opportunity there.
John Wilson: I'm going to repeat this back. I think I got it, but it's the took the big location. Pretty big. Greenfield started acquiring. You're seeing acquiring.
John Wilson: You're going to continue to Greenfield, but you'd be due for your next one here shortly then because Nashville was a few years ago. I can strangers people on
Chris Hoffman: that. Sure, if I had the right person to do it tomorrow. Yeah, I just don't have the right person to do it.
John Wilson: No, it's challenging.
John Wilson: I was talking to And I think I quoted you honestly, I don't remember who it was But i'm pretty sure it was you that tweeted this and it was it's not complicated to find like a air quotes gm more like ops manager for a five million dollar brand but finding one for a 20 million dollar brand is much more complicated there's a ton of them that could successfully run a five But there's just not that many that can run a high growth 20 You
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, I get the problem.
Chris Hoffman: It's a huge issue. And if you're like Jack in your case, right? If say you want to hire GM, it's you don't want to hire the guy that can just run your business at its current size and complexity. You would want to hire the guy that can run it at the size and complexity that you aspire to be right at that next stage.
Chris Hoffman: But then that becomes hyper expensive. The talent becomes hyper expensive. And that's been a huge issue here recently. Just with the introduction of private equity into the space, those that GM level talent has become very for particularly for very good operators of large single look at 50 plus million dollar locations, the compensation levels are very high and there's a lot of management, incentive, equity that's going on.
Chris Hoffman: Being thrown at these folks which is like a coin toss. It could be worth nothing or it could be worth a million bucks, or it could be worth a couple million bucks. But I think that's got a lot of talent locked up and a lot of talent. Particularly the really good talent is very expensive.
Chris Hoffman: The market for GMs in the HVAC plumbing electrical world at 50 million plus, that's a great place to be if you're trained to be in that role. Cause you can make a ton of money. There's also just
John Wilson: not that many. Like we, we just went through this the sales guy. Yeah, we just went through and we hired a director of sales recently and like the person that we were looking for, there's maybe 20, like there's maybe 20 like in industry that already knew the sort of solutions for the problems that we had.
John Wilson: So it, it was yeah, it's a complicated problem.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah,
John Wilson: it totally is. How do you, how are you thinking about the next greenfield? Obviously talent, that's a big issue. Do you feel like you've selected the target? Or are you debating between a couple markets? Or how does that look?
Chris Hoffman: We know which one we would do next.
Chris Hoffman: I don't know that I'll throw it out here. We've got a great, we've got a great methodology that There's 9 factors that we plug into this model. We use a lot of publicly available MSA data around some things that you mentioned, home ownership rates, median household incomes, there's some binary variables around licensing, a number of different factors we plug in there.
Chris Hoffman: And then and then we punch in MSA. We're trying to stay in the Midwest, South. I don't want, I'm not going to go to the coast or go too far away, but we punched some locations in there and it's spit out where we think we ought to go. I will say what I do think is interesting. We've we're looking at some things in central Missouri, central Illinois.
Chris Hoffman: Yes, or a possible Greenfield. And I we've been ideating around this hub and spoke model idea where if St. Louis is a big hub and there's a lot of infrastructure there, both in terms of people and talent but also warehousing, supply chain, purchasing replenishment, a lot of the things that a location needs.
Chris Hoffman: If we opened a location that's 90 minutes away, do we need a warehouse there or can we do same day replenishments from the hub?
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes greenfielding from 3 million to 400. Good. And then there's probably some
Chris Hoffman: brand awareness too, because if you're in Springfield, Missouri or Columbia, Missouri, and you watch baseball in St.
Chris Hoffman: Louis and we're all over baseball in St. Louis, there's probably also some like marketing fringe benefit that exists in these peripheral markets.
John Wilson: I think the maybe unspoken benefit it is if you launch in these sort of tertiary or tier three or whatever you want to call them markets. Like we just said, it's easier to find a GM or Ops Manager from 5 to 20.
John Wilson: So there's talent available for smaller branches that just isn't available for larger. So you could get a branch to 10 million dollars and you would Finding talent wouldn't be as complicated as Nashville. I think that's right.
Chris Hoffman: And I would operationally, if we did that, like this spoke model, I would have the spokes likely report up under the span of care of the GM of the hub.
Chris Hoffman: So just in terms of like organizationally, that's cleaner than having, 15 GMs of which 10 of them are leading like 6 million operations.
John Wilson: So in the next, the new stage of growth for Hoffman as you see it is to continue driving a greenfield at a time and really doubling or tripling down on acquisitions, which this is a new discipline for you guys,
Chris Hoffman: newer in the last year or two.
Chris Hoffman: Yeah, and sustain really high organic growth as high as we can. I don't want to be, I think a really good indicator of an organization's health. So often you hear when folks talk about their growth rates, particularly PE or folks that are actively acquiring. Yeah. They say we grew 30 percent this year, but if you net out inorganic growth from acquisitions, and you look at organic growth at the unit level, at the brand level some of the stories being told are pretty abysmal.
Chris Hoffman: It's oh shit, actually your organic growth rate across all your existing brands, if you exclude acquired EBITDA you shrunk in 2024. Yeah, but those are the stories people won't tell, and I want to make sure that we're continuing to fire on all cylinders with the, at the organic growth level, at the brand level.
Chris Hoffman: And then any acquisitions we're doing, they need to be super creative, and we need to have the ability to meaningfully drive value creation inside of those businesses. And then I think the other Greenfield play outside of HVAC, plumbing, electrical is roofing. Now that we've built the roofing playbook, and we're in the process of getting that dialed in I think it will be very easy to Greenfield in the roofing space, because if I go to a Nashville, To Greenfield, the roofing brand we're really good at top of funnel activities with marketing CX call center.
Chris Hoffman: We've got all that infrastructure in place and that's easy. Then we just need to curate a network or really high quality network of independent contractors and subs and then some sales folks boots on the ground. The other thing you can do from a sales perspective, if you have a roofing brand and an HVAC brand in the same market, the seasonality with HVAC and the seasonality with roofing, they don't peak at the same time.
Chris Hoffman: So we could cross train salespeople to run both roofing bids and HVAC bids and it it increases sort of the sales teams utilization rate. And you don't have to actually add net FTEs net headcount to accommodate that and they can make a lot more money. And you could share in some of that savings by not needing additional FTEs.
Chris Hoffman: So again, the Greenfield of roofing in Nashville. I already have the salespeople. I already have the call center have an internal marketing agency ready to go and fire it up. I just need to recruit a network of independent contractors and crews and some production coordinators on the ground. And we could be off to the races.
Chris Hoffman: So I actually think Greenfielding on the roofing side is something that's in our deck here that we're thinking pretty hard about. But our ambition, we say by December 31st, 2028, we want to be 400 million dollar top line organization with 1500 team members on the bus.
Chris Hoffman: And I think that's something we could potentially outkick that depending on some of these. It seems like
John Wilson: you're, in total, aren't you, it was 150 with roofing or 160 with roofing?
Chris Hoffman: No, we're under but we were targeting 140 this year and we're going to end up being 130.
John Wilson: Okay. Okay. Okay.
Chris Hoffman: Okay. We would, I thought roofing was not a
John Wilson: part of that description earlier.
Chris Hoffman: Okay. No, it is. So with this acquisition, that's this coming up, that would put us right at 160 or so this year.
John Wilson: Yeah, this year. Obviously there's some obvious challenges. Has there been anything aside from the obvious? Consumer financing or leads? No,
Chris Hoffman: no, I don't think it's no different than what I think everyone else's is facing.
Chris Hoffman: I also, I get really hesitant like talking to teams about this because it's a very it's very like defeating and it absolves you of responsibility when we give ourselves all these excuses, why external factors are causing us not to hit our goals, just as a leader and as leaders in our organization, I really ask for People to focus on only those variables that we can influence or can control.
Chris Hoffman: And yes, I know there's noise out there. Yes, I know. Interest rates are up and I know consumer spending's down and I know household debt is up and all there's an election. I got it, but we can't control that. We can just control what we're doing today to impact the outcome tomorrow. Today. And so I'd like to keep the focus there.
Chris Hoffman: Those things exist but and I don't want to ignore them, but I also don't want to allow them to become excuses. Yeah, 1, 1 CEO. I appreciated his comment. He said, we don't participate. We choose not to participate in recessions.
Chris Hoffman: And I just that mindset of yeah, participation in a recession and down economy is a choice.
Chris Hoffman: And we're going to make sure we run our business where we can overcome even a tough market.
John Wilson: You've taken the business from 10 to 130. If you had a passing message to two extremely handsome young entrepreneurs in the space, one bald, one not bald on this zoom screen with you, what would that look like?
Jack Carr: Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah.
Chris Hoffman: You guys are doing it. And I think just be patient. I think in our world, when you tune into these podcasts or you look at social media, it's, Oftentimes, it feels like people around you are doing it overnight, and it's not freaking easy, right?
Chris Hoffman: Jack, you're building a business. I never navigated the stage of growth that you're navigating, and it's probably harder than some of the stages of growth that I'm navigating those early pre 10 million range. That's freaking tough. Stay the course and be patient, right? Something great things aren't built overnight.
Chris Hoffman: They're not built in a year or 2 years or 3 years. And I'd say just stay the course, stay disciplined, stay focused on the basics. And I think the great things will that'll be the outcome. No doubt.
John Wilson: My, my last question and we'll tie this out. You've continued to say, focus on the basics, which I like a lot and something that you've done.
John Wilson: What seems is from the outside, looking in a better job than what we've done is the ability to keep things simple, whereas we have a tendency to overcomplicate as an organization, which continually slows us down as we continue to try to make it simpler and simpler, is there a tool or something that.
John Wilson: You can give us to walk away with on that.
Chris Hoffman: No, I think it's a mindset and I think leaders have to be aligned around this. Like we have a saying, we say simple is scalable, right? And it's like complexity is not scalable. And so when you're designing comp plans, even if you think you have the best comp plan in the world, if it's super complex, that's not it.
Chris Hoffman: And not only simple is scalable, but I would say standardization is you get into multi market multi location, you acquire multi brands, like how you're administering. Payroll and bonus programs and your policy manuals and PTO and all those different things like standardization and simplicity should be a guiding force in all of your decisions.
Chris Hoffman: And I would say that's particularly true as you're integrating acquisitions, the experiences with the roofing business, and we're really dialed into this as we think about future partnerships is. If there's an opportunity to align process, align workflow, align around a single technology platform, we need to be doing all of those things because what I don't want to be is 15 brands with different technologies and different methods of paying folks and on aligned benefit enrollment dates and renewal dates.
Chris Hoffman: And none of we just really standardization, simplicity those are guiding principles that every leader needs to be driving towards
John Wilson: if people want to get to know more about you. Where can they do that?
Chris Hoffman: Twitter, LinkedIn, give me a follow, shoot me a DM. Admittedly, I'm super bad at keeping up with those inboxes, but I may look at it.
Chris Hoffman: I may not, I don't know.
John Wilson: Cool. Chris, thanks for coming on today. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate you opening it up. And this will be a great episode when it airs. It's going to help a lot of people. Chris. Love it. Thanks for having me, guys.
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