Mike Barnhart
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Mike Barnhart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A lot of times I'll look at location differences. So I want to see how locations are scaling on margin. As CFOs, we definitely care about margin. And that's the nice thing. When you're green fielding a location, you can get to margin stability before you can get to cash flow stability. And you want to keep focusing on how do I actually just
make this a margin profitable business where some people have gross margin of 50%, some people are 55%. It really depends on what your trade is. If you're heavy HVAC replacement, you're probably going to be lower than if you're an electric residential service. But trying to manage that 50 plus percent margin across your business is always going to keep you super healthy.
So we did the brand, started in 2022, so we were about $40 million.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, he just showed me your pickup truck wrap. That looked pretty good.
I want one of those. But the... Yeah, we worked with them because we added HVAC and electric and we worked with Wizard of Ads on that one. It was adding electric was pretty last minute decision. But, you know, the brand is eco plumbers, electricians and HVAC technicians. That's very intentional. It's not eco plumbing. It's not eco electric. It's eco plumbers. It's eco electricians.
It's about the people. It's not about the service. And so we rebranded as that, made it more focused on the eco. So it's very in your face. Even this year, so we're almost up to 300 trucks now. And we realized we don't need billboards in Columbus, Ohio anymore. We have 250 of them going around. So let's put that money into a different part of marketing.
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I'm the finance side of the business, and I do some ops. But, you know, I've always been super lucky. Like, Aaron's always handled marketing and sales strategy. But Roy seems to really like me. He calls me Bear. But, you know, the... We have a good relationship with them.
And, you know, I think the interesting thing is the way I look at marketing and the way that Aaron and him look at marketing are way different. So like every time I've had an idea, he's basically like, that's a terrible idea, Mike, because I don't think that like I look at it like, you know, maybe connecting with the logic or the value of a customer.
And he thinks about marketing more about storytelling and being an entertainer and really just like, you know, taking a minute to allow people to think about something else from their day other than what's actually happening in their lives. And for that, it's been a really good partnership. We've definitely created a storyline that happens within the business.
And he's done a great job for other companies as well.
Yeah, him and Aaron still talk every week.
You know, I've heard it from certain companies. At the same time, we just didn't experience it much. Like we did 25% organic growth last year. We're doing on right now. I mean, yesterday we had our largest sales day in company history at almost $600,000. It's just, it seems to be moving in our direction the right way.
But I have heard that some, even some of those PE groups have, you know, been down year over year, you know, four to 5%.
Really?
Yeah.
I understand.
And you do. Well, your business is so different than mine in the fact that if you have a replacement, you're probably not going to see that customer for a long time. Unless you have, I don't know if you have memberships.
Yeah, we've got 50,000. So 50,000. Wow. So last year we made a big push on memberships and we went out, we sold 10,000 memberships last year. So I heard like you talk about some of your core tenets this year, call center and marketing. One of ours is actually membership fulfillment. Like we have 30 students in our HVAC school right now to become clean check maintenance techs.
And they get good at the turnover? What's that?
Right now, well, these are green people that have no industry experience. We're teaching them, and then we'll flip them to the LTO experience eventually. But for me, that's the biggest unknown part of our business. Like right now, our call volume is so high. And historically, we've always had about 70% of our customers be net new customers, and that's becoming 60 and 50.
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