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
So that is actually something we're investing into this year.
But your best guy is probably going to get a yes from that customer if your garage door replacement is $10,000 or $12,000, right? He's probably going to do it. But there's other indicators that would make the customer more likely to say yes to a $12,000 if we were doing it around demand pricing properly. And that's a little bit of my argument.
Yeah, as a CFO, CFO is always like, hey, let's not offer financing plans that have any dealer fees because they don't want to pay the dealer fees. They want to control the margin better. And this takes that away. If it's automatically building it in, let the customer pick whatever they want because we're not paying for it anymore.
Right. And we think about that a lot from the opposite. I think it's probably hard to think about that while you're running the call. I know you have some really top-end sales guys. We've got one named Adam.
I talk to Adam all the time. I mean, this guy's super passionate about sales. And I remember I went on a road trip with him one time, and he spent four hours replaying his calls for me. But he's got this saying that we've kind of adopted in our sales team. Because we asked the question of, how do you stay excited doing the same thing three, four times a day every single day?
And he says, when I knock on the door, I say to myself, it's showtime. This is my show. And, you know, I start playing my role. And, you know, I get excited for it because, you know, it's showtime.
Yeah, I mean, we are actually pretty close to 3 to 1. But you start talking about certain ratios, like, yeah, I mean, you can look at an income statement. But an income statement can be misleading. You asked me, is 15% that benchmark? Well, then really, what's the benchmark of cash flow on that? You know Carl Icahn?
One of his famous sayings is that happiness is positive cash flow. Because that's really what matters at the end of the day. Are we generating cash from what we're doing? You can hide stuff on an income statement by putting it on a balance sheet. You can never hide stuff on the cash flow statement. It's really going to tell you the true story of the business. So that's one that we always look at.
And if you're generating... Even if you're generating 15% of profit, after you're paying taxes, after you're doing all the distributions and everything, you should still be looking to get 7% to 8% actual free cash flow at the end of the day.
We are transparent on our income statement, but I don't think people are really going to understand paying taxes. Yeah, that's true.
So I mean, I'm actually kind of famous in the company of not telling anybody when I change the prices or increase prices. I don't usually tell anybody that's happening because I don't think the price is the price. This is what we need to do in order to be profitable. I don't think I actually need to communicate it out. And people ask like, hey, did the prices change? And I'm like, yeah, they did.
But that should just be part of business. It shouldn't be really important.
Yeah. I don't think that they're looking at, you know, they're trying to understand the entire cost of the business and what our sold hours should be, what our efficiency should be. You know, obviously we want to become more efficient as a company. If we can, we'll become more profitable. But you're not going to plan on becoming more efficient.
You're going to plan on operating your business as it currently is.
So in the HVAC, we're testing this. It's a product we're testing in HVAC sales right now. So it's not across the entire business, but we are seeing some positive results. And it's a third party company, so you could sign up for it if you were selling HVAC.
systems but they you know the way that they present to their customer is the way they present to the customer is it is you know very much a toggle method of like here's the options and but you can see very if I don't want you know this humidifier I just press a button and toggles it back off and it's the price changes and you can see you can really you're putting that power into your
customer's hands rather than service side and somewhat static, like here's the estimate. The other thing, you're building the financing fees in. Another cool aspect of it was that you are, anytime they cut, like if you don't close right there and a customer re-engages with that estimate, like they open it back up. You know when they get notified. And the salesperson gets notified.
And it prompts the salesperson to say like, hey, do you have any questions you want to ask about this or is there anything I can help you with? So it's better communication. It's better buying experience. HVAC, it's a newer thing to us. If you took it back, we've only been doing it for three years. I mean, our conversion rates used to be like 25%. Now they're pretty much 50% on a regular basis.
So we've been doing a lot better. Um, and then our average sales gone up to, I mean, that, you know, that's the crazy part of our business. Like when you look at, if you look at a business that's going down this year, um, well, you know, in HVAC, well, we've got the 454 transition, which will probably raise your price is 10%.
And then you've got tariffs, which might raise your material price is 10%.
Showing 81–100 of 141 · page 5 of 8
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