Rob Parker
speaker
1,301 appearances
75 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 29 Aug
Rob Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 74 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 42.
Appearances
concentration, longer payment terms, and it's a maybe slightly more sophisticated buyer that isn't using emotion in their decision and is typically making their decision off more of a pricing spreadsheet type analysis. Then there's the residential side. The residential side, the best part about it, it's so fragmented, so big. many, many, many individual homeowners.
One of our former clients who we recently were with made a comment. He said, you know, I would way rather have 5,000 individual homeowner purchasing guys to deal with than one tough purchasing guy from Walmart. that fragmentation has a lot of value. It can sometimes be a slightly more emotional buy.
If you come in and you've got a very tight quoting process, it's done on an iPad, it's very clean, it's clear, it's organized, the homeowner understands it, the technician came in, they were polite, they were respectful, they took their shoes off, all these kinds of things. A homeowner can say, you know, they're more expensive. I trust this person. I think they're going to do right by me.
And you can get better pricing if you do some of those kinds of things. So the pricing can often be, and your margin profile, therefore, can often be a little bit better in the residential side.
Your example with Dan Miller is a good one. I mean, I remember in my own business at Corton, when my partner and I started, we did everything. I was the one managing QuickBooks. There was one time I forgot to pay our health insurance bill, and my wife called me. She's like, the health insurance didn't work. So I went into QuickBooks and paid it. We were doing everything.
And over time, as we brought people in, and we had talented people in roles that they were well-suited to do, That's when our business really grew. And that's a small example. I think in a business like A1 or a lot of the clients that Eric and I deal with, having experts in a seat, in a role that they're well-suited to perform, and in many cases are way better to do that work than the CEO is.
The CEO's job is to inspire, motivate, be the visionary, grow the business, make the hard final decisions. The CEO shouldn't be involved in getting the numbers organized. You should be interpreting those numbers and doing those kinds of things, but someone has to do it.
And so the more you've got talent in place in these critical roles, HR, finance, IT, if you're a platform, you have someone who runs mergers and acquisitions. You have someone who runs integration. You have some of those key roles filled. The CEO can go do what they need to do and really grow a business and create something scaled and valuable.
Good data that's easy to interpret and organized well leads to the best decisions. There's no doubt about it.
gross profit gross margin yes let's talk about that yeah i mean in a lot of ways it's a proxy for how valuable your customer perceives your service because really it's at the end of the day it's it's the margin you get on the product you sell without a lot of the without the sgna without the sales cost without the administrative costs of the company all those kinds of things it's kind of your product margin in many ways so it's a great way it's one of the first things that a lot of people will look at
is so how valuable do your customers view your product or service and gross margin is an indication of that.
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's, so if you think about a private equity firm, They take in money from investors, and those investors are institutions. They're endowments, insurance companies, ultra high net worth families, all these sorts of large institutional pools of capital, and they invest that money on their behalf.
So they have a fiduciary duty to those investors that they're going to really do a very thorough due diligence process. And part of that process is in a business, and A1 is maybe a little unique. Literally your picture is on every single vehicle out there on the road.
You know, it's important to understand to do a background check on you and to call people that maybe you've worked with in the past to get an unfiltered view. If you called somebody that works with you today, they would be more inclined to say favorable things because you're their boss.
If you call somebody that doesn't work for you anymore, but used to, that might be a good way to get an unvarnished view of what you're like in the workplace. Are you a motivator? Do you inspire people? Or are you negative and are you, you dress people down in a public way and do you detract from the business and by the way you operate? It's important for them to understand as much as they can.
You know, I'll tell you that the single most important factor I've observed in doing this for nearly 25 years in a successful investment is the leader, the leader and that leader's team. You can have a great idea, great concept, great industry, bad industry.
What matters the most is who is the evangelist at the top that's leading the organization and who is the team that that person has surrounded themselves with. And it makes diligence on that individual just really important. And it's not just background check, things that you can find on Google, or you can hire a firm like Kroll and others to do kind of a background review.
It's also calling people who used to work with you and saying, what is he like in the workplace?
I feel like it's happening more and more. Maybe not at 4 million in EBITDA. Maybe not that thorough. They'll definitely do a background check. I mean, that's not that hard to do. I mean, heck, you can find out a lot just by going to Google. They'll definitely do that. They may not do the call around of people they find in your LinkedIn or people who used to work with you.
They may not go quite that far, but diligence is getting, it's more every year. I feel like it's a little bit more thorough.
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