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 in HVAC, they switched energy efficiency from $410 to $454, but it raised equipment prices about 8% to 10%. If you're not growing 16%, you're basically static to last year.
Yeah. They brag about growth, but yeah. Yeah. So that's one way to look at it. But another thing with that one is important. You are having these things that are happening with your business. And Aaron knows this. And I love to get a win in negotiating. Negotiating is my favorite thing to do. But regularly, just going back to our vendors and saying, are we going to accept these price increases?
Are we going to at least have a conversation about it? Because you can literally save, like, 10% across your business just by negotiating stuff. And I mean, like any piece of software out there is negotiated. I mean, we've got one deal that right now we have like our phone systems are basically being, our iPads are basically being paid for for three years for switching over to this other company.
I agree with that.
Yeah, I mean, I've got a few thoughts. I mean, recruiting across our trades is if you don't have a dedicated recruiter, you should. At $10 million, you should have a dedicated recruiter because it's that important in your business, even if you're just recruiting students. Back in 2019, we were booked out like three weeks for plumbing services.
So we looked at it, and we said we have to create a school. We got that launched up. And we even knew when we launched the school, we said, you know, this first class is probably going to suck. But the 10th won't. And now we're on, like, 16th. And, you know, it's a pretty good program that really brings people into the trades.
The other thing about recruiting is, like, you have to have, you know, whether you call them your core values, your guiding principles, you have to have the right fit of people. I don't know. I mean, you grew in your business from the ground up. And I remember, like, a... I remember reading this book called Sapiens, and I read it right around the time we were around 150 people.
And it was like, hey, once a community hits 150 people, it fragments into another community because that's about as many people as you can know. And so if you're not recruiting well, like right now we're at 400 people, like, yeah, I have to spend most of my time walking around saying, hi, I'm Mike, because I don't know the people in the company anymore.
So you have to make sure that you are recruiting for those values that you really think are important. And that's where a good recruiter will be worth their weight in gold. The other thing that I will say about creating the own people in your trades, and I know you have a great training center here. I toured through it. It's amazing. People don't think about this.
It creates that alma mater effect. We've had people leave. you know, for whatever, $5 more on the hour or something. And they come back because they're like, well, all my friends are here. This is where I learned the trade. This is my school. Like, this is my university, whatever, you know, you call it.
It creates an alma mater effect that you're giving back to the trades, but you're also creating this kind of community of people that you brought into the trades.
You know, we actually thought the same around our budgeting conversations this year. We had a similar conversation that our mission statement was too long. And we really just switched it down to one statement of to create great tradespeople, advance their lives, and win big. That's what we want to do. It's not necessarily about the customer experience. It's about what we're doing for each other.
Yeah, I mean, Jack's on the team. He's on our leadership call every week. He's been amazing to work with. We were going through the budgeting cycle this year, and we talked about the importance of budgets and the importance of missions and core values and all that stuff. And one of the things that he talked about is that as leaders— we are dealers of hope.
And he actually, this is from like the King Solomon Bible. And there's this phrase, without hope, the people will perish. And so we have to be providing hope for everybody that's part of our team. And that has sat with me since he brought up the concept.
And literally, I don't think a week goes by that I don't think about that, is that we as leaders are dealers of hope so that our people don't perish.
I mean, one of the things I'll just mention that I think I've always done pretty well throughout this, and I remember when you called me back in 2015. You probably don't remember this. You called me, and I'd only been at Eco for about six months, and I'd kind of implemented ServiceTitan, built out the price book and all that within ServiceTitan. And you called me, and you were like...
um, Hey, I want to get on service Titan. I heard you're on it. Cause I think we were like the 30th customer are a pitched Aaron individually. And, you know, you start talking to me about it and I know, I know you got onto it. So, you know, you were very persistent, but I was like, man, this guy is special. Like, and I was like, Oh, you got to talk to this guy.
And I know you and Aaron are now like best friends, but you know, I hooked you guys up to start talking, but, um, the importance of building your network, whether you're a CFO, whether you're a manager, I just connected my GM and another GM from a company today that I thought that they should know each other.
You really just need to spend time building your network, both professionally within the industry. And then, I mean, there's like, I'm part of a group called YPO that I've really enjoyed. And I mean, sort of like, you know, your hundred thousand dollar group, it's a, you know, you just building these relationships with people that are thinking about things the same way you are.
And those relationships tend to just open so many doors, to help out the company and to help out you.
Showing 101–120 of 141 · page 6 of 8
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