Travis Ringe

Don't always go to your technician, your installer, your manager, because you're not going to get all the raw information that you should be getting. You should always talk to the consumer, especially in the early stages of doing business when you have less than 10 people.

I got one. What I've found out in the top performers and next gen and across other businesses that I've seen, the top performers are always grabbing the better car, grabbing the better watches, going in there and getting the second house. So they're building financial pressure in themselves to be able to perform.

And that's one of the key attributes that I always look at when I'm recruiting people. And you said at the beginning of the podcast, I'm relentless in recruiting, man. I love recruiting. I love talking to people. But when I do recruit it, I kind of put them through a journey of asking them questions of where they're at in their journey, just to see where I'm going to place them in the operation.

Because you walk in and it's like, yeah, I have my four kids. They're out of college already. Mortgage is paid off. Wife is good. She doesn't work. Yeah.

that's not going to be a super hungry person that's going to show up to work and want to fucking innovate the we are nothing but you you come up with a 25 year old that just got married had their first kid they're about to you know look for their first house that kid is going to show up to fucking work every day and trying to grind down as make and make as much money as you can so those little things you got to pay attention to yeah

Yeah, you know, it's funny that you brought that up, Travis, because, you know, the ones that are rough around the ages, too, are dope, too. Like, I have, like, the top performer that Leland was talking about that made over a million dollars works at Nexion. He's been there for four years. He's made, you know, I think he's going to make like $900,000 this year at Nexion.

tattoos, neck tattoos, fucking, you know, tattoos all over. Like you can tell he's not a well pot, but once you hear him speak and the way he carries himself, the confidence he has when he presents and all that is, is dope. So like a little rough around the edges is not always a bad thing. Those people are always, you know, there's always some kind of molding that you could work with.

Your ass should be on the phone with the consumer finding out what's wrong with it because the reviews are telling you what's wrong inside the operation. The reviews are giving you a glimpse of giving you insight of the operation that you're not seeing. That's why people are going in there and obviously complaining of it, right?

Good, Thomas. Thank you for inviting us, buddy. And congratulations on your podcast.

And to lead on to that, there's some companies out there that are struggling, Tommy, that are looking at like, is it my average ticket? Is it my repair? Is it my conversion? Is it this? Is it that? It's your fucking sales department. Yeah. Your sales department covers up so, let me rephrase this. Your sales department covers up so many fucking mistakes in and out of the operation.

Like there is nothing, there's almost nothing in the operation that sales can't cover. Yeah. And we're forgetting about that because we're so focused on KPIs and driving and marketing and customer acquisition for customers and Google and all this. We're so cluttered in all those numbers that we forget that we are fucking sales before we're a sales machine.

Is this the best podcast in the industry? Sorry.

Honestly, congrats. Because that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.

Dude, that's the number one problem that the industry has. The number one problem that the industry has is that we all settle for B and C and D players because there's not enough A players. That's the major issue. And I'm talking as a, you know, high, high out of this universe spectrum, looking at the operation in is we do not have enough people

enough A players, enough good people working inside the trades. That's the number one thing we got to fix as a team, as LSD, as entrepreneurs, as the next generation of contractors coming in. If we can fix where people want to be plumbers, they want to fix garage doors, they want to be AC technicians, they want to do that.

If we can fix that side of the spectrum, then we don't have to worry about the 20% of your company driving 80% of the revenue. Right now, we're doing that because there's only 20% that we can recruit. The other 80% are working at Google, at Facebook, at ServiceTitan, at all these other companies because of all the things that they do for them. We need to fix the recruitment problem.

Thomas's best quality is talking about himself.

Because we are the first... I mean, why not buy Nuve?

They came to the contractors. In 2018, Nest had... 2018-19, Nest flew me out. It was me, Service Champions, Bell Brothers, Bill from ASI. It was like five of the top contractors in California in 2018. They flew us all out to Google headquarters and they had...

the big fucking problem in the industry and people don't know about this because it was an exclusive meeting just for us five and their meeting was like hey we have so many you guys we're gonna give you guys free leads every everybody's gonna have free leads and i'm like why free leads oh it's because we sold all these thermostats and we're having all these customers call us and they're

You know, they don't seem to know how to install these thermostats and we're just having too many warranty issues. So they're not free leads, they're warranties. And that's the one part that I did not want, that we at Nuva did not want to skip. We did not want to go around the contractor.

We did not want to just sell this to the public because look, we can literally call Goodman right now or call Home Depot. We have the relationships where we can grab Home Depot and be like, hey, put this on your shelf. It's going to be the next best thing next to next, right? We can do that, but we didn't want to do that to our fellow contractors.

And that's one of the main, you know, things we want.

Right.

They try to get into the settings. So how does that work? So the contractor will get notified if they try to get into the settings. They'll see the logo in there. So once a contractor tries to get in... the original contractor will get notified. Then you have the option to be able to contact this customer and be like, hey, you have another company out there. It might, you're at risk.

Yeah, it's probably still under warranty. Hey, you're at risk of voiding the warranty if you have anybody else work on our systems that we've created, which right now there's hundreds and thousands of people out there that worked on the unit, a next-chain unit, right? And there's a Nest or an Echo Beer or Honeywell.

I don't think they're going down. I think they're struggling, though, for sure. So I don't think they're going down, per se. I do think there's some of them are going to go down, but I wouldn't say the vast majority are going down. They're struggling for sure. And I believe the struggle that they're having is due to lack of innovation.

And they called somebody else because we couldn't get out there soon enough or they forgot who did it. And guess what? We lost that customer. Nobody even knew. You think that somebody called next year and say, hey, I'm about to go with somebody else? No, we just keep losing customers. That's why our retention, and this is across all platforms in the home service industry, is less than 10%.

Our overall retention is less than 10%.

And that's the one aspect when you asked us, hey, you know, to the to the consumer, like how to what what different. That's what we didn't want. We want the consumer to know it's just a regular thermostat. We don't need them. We don't need to teach the customer something else. We don't need to go out there and, you know, retrain your technicians on everything.

How to wire, how to like to the consumer and the technician. We want them to know, just install this thermostat, put it on the wall. Now on the back end, that's where we come in. And you're handling it all. Of course. That's where all the back end onboarding comes in, where all the dashboard training comes in with all messaging centers and all that.

And Travis just came up with a... Dude, I want you to talk on it, Travis, because what we did right now on that whiteboard on how we're going to teach these contractors how to monetize the monitoring. And you nailed it right in the head.

It's a no brainer to get it for sure.

And once we show that, it's going to be so easy for them to... To add on to what you said, just to be able to save one truck roll, bro, that pays for the thermostat itself. How many times have we gotten called and been like, Hey, my system's not working automatically. What do we do? Roll a truck. You guys were here two weeks ago. My system seems to work. What do we do? Roll a truck.

We keep rolling trucks for the same reason over and over when we could have just logged into their Nuva dashboard, looked at the monitoring, and told the consumer, hey, you just turned on your system 12 minutes ago. Give it time so it could go down. It's 95 degrees outside. One truck roll pays for the thermostat. One click pays for the thermostat.

One click pays for that thermostat. One truck roll pays for that thermostat. For $49 more, you retain a client for fucking life. How simple is that? I don't know how to slice it.

Yes, that too. And we already have something planned for that.

Explain that. That's Travis's specialty right there.

Yeah.

So that would eliminate about 90% of your wires for a system. 90% of your wires would eliminate.

Instead of being there running wires, cutting drywall.

Tommy, you sound like a technician for a minute.

You sounded a little bit smarter, but Cat5 wire to your thermostat, that's an atomic bomb right there.

You just say, yeah, number one, we will. I would jump on the phone. And this was in the early stages of next gen. I had to do it so I can show my management team because they're like, oh, well, you know, we'll call them later. And, you know, we'll get it. And it's like, no, no, no, no. You have about five minutes.

When that review is post, you have about five minutes to get to that customer while they have that anger issue, whatever it is that they have inside that they want to talk to you about. You have about five minutes to reach out to them. And that's the culture that we created at Nexion is as soon as one star review came in, I gave everybody a five minute timer.

My assistant would send it over on a screenshot and put it on the group message with all the management team. And they would have about five minutes to get rid of it. At all costs. This means, you know, giving money back or talking to the customer, giving them free services, whatever it took. Because one bad review, and this is from Yelp, costed about $100,000 worth of business. One bad review.

Yep. About a hundred. This is from Yelp.

Yeah. So once I learned that, I built a culture of urgency on a bad review. And then what I did, and I'm not saying you guys should do it too, but this is a good idea where it worked, is we would hit the bonuses of every executive and director and manager in the company that had control over that experience. We would hit the review. So for a three-star review, they would get $100 off their bonus.

A two-star review, they would get $200. And a one-star, they would get $300 off their bonus. So I'm not saying you guys should do it to that extent, but that's how serious we were taking that in action.

And don't always go to your technician, your installer, your manager, because you're not going to get all the raw information that you should be getting. You should always talk to the consumer, especially in the early stages of doing business when you have less than 10 people.

Your ass should be on the phone with the consumer finding out what's wrong with it because the reviews are telling you what's wrong inside the operation. The reviews are giving you a glimpse. Giving you insight of the operation that you're not seeing. That's why people are going in there and obviously complaining of it. Right.

And our jobs as entrepreneurs, our CEOs and operators is to pay attention to the consumer and pay attention to what they're saying. Because look at your scale, my scale, Travis's scale. We have hundreds of thousands of clients. Yeah. Like we can't.

We can't like you imagine trying to listen to all of them at once, but the reviews will always tell you the truth.

Tommy, you just laid out three freaking huge golden nuggets for your audience. And I think you should repeat them because... The screenshotting of your employee. Dude, that is gold right there. The, hey, playing good cop, bad cop with your managers. And hey, the owner is going to find out and he's going to get rid of it. That is another huge, huge point.

And our jobs as entrepreneurs, our CEOs and operators is to pay attention to the consumer and pay attention to what they're saying.

Like some of these things that you brush over, like I promise you, your listeners would love to hear you say it again. Because those three things that you just said right now to all the little guys that are trying to figure out, how do I deal with all these bad reviews coming in? What you just said right now is-

You know, it's funny, Tommy, that we're over here talking about reviews and like how we could help and all that. And next to us, Travis, is probably the best image across the board in all home service platforms. I think, what do you have? Five stars across everything? Like perfect five stars. Not 4.8, not 4.9.

The one thing I will say though, and I got this from Leland, is that I would never apologize for pricing. That's the one thing I got from leaving. I've had many conversations with him. And the one thing that stuck out with me, there's two things that stuck out with me that Leland brought out to my attention was his membership model, which I admire. And I think it's a dope-ass model.

But the second thing, he's like, Ishmael, I don't care if they go on Yelp and Google and Facebook and bash on my company about my pricing, I will never, ever apologize for my pricing.

You have a saying though that you say all the time.

That one too. But you said... Do you want me to... I will match their pricing when they match our service.

I love that. That's a dope-ass quote.

I'll give you guys something that I've recently discovered in the last couple of years. All the technicians and all the installers are on Instagram. All the technicians, all the installers are on Instagram. All the managers, all the sales guys, all the older clients, they're all on Facebook. So depending on the position that you guys are trying to recruit for.

Based on your profile, it attracts the people that you're marketing to. So on my profile, if you go on there, it says plumber, HVAC, all that. And when you're doing ads, it goes based on that. So you'll start attracting those kind of people. So technicians, younger crowds, if you're looking for hungry sales guys too, they're all on Instagram. Every single one of them.

Not yet. Okay. It's probably too young still. Yeah. I told the same thing to Chad Peterman, and last time we had a meeting, he's like, Ishmael, you're 100% right. He's like, I put an ad out on Instagram for technicians and installers, and we got so many people applying. Indeed.

And the problem that most of these, you know, PE groups and older generation that are used to running those type of businesses, they're still looking for technicians on fucking Indeed. On LinkedIn. On LinkedIn. They still think that there's technicians that they should put an ad on a newspaper and technicians are going to keep flooding in.

That mentality that you just said, Tommy, about we only hire people that are brand new to the industry because we want to mold them into what we want to do. That's an old school mentality, man. I guarantee there's people at NextGen right now that would do better at another company. And just like there's people at other companies that would thrive at next gen. Well, right.

I did.

The problem that most people do is that they only recruit when they need to or when they think they need to. Recruiting is a 365 job. When I was heavily involved in that next gen, there wasn't one day that I was like, oh, today I'm going to recruit. Every day. Day. You never let a good person.

There was never a day that I wasn't texting somebody, calling somebody, trying to get more sales guys, trying to get more installers, trying to get more technician. If I heard somebody was doing good at another company, I would figure out a way to get in their Facebook, their Instagram, figure out a way to who they were and start talking to them.

So the problem is most people, most companies only recruit when they think they need to. And recruitment is a full time job. job that has to be done no matter if you're slow, if you're super busy, doesn't matter. You just have to keep doing it.

I think that's the one thing we got to learn from our old generation was that consistency of not being able to have those huge swings in profit and revenue.

Like that's the one thing that we do give, that I give back, that I give credit to like our founding fathers, Paul Kelly and Leland Smith and all those guys that they were so consistent in every aspect of the business, not just revenue, not just, you know, average chicken, all that profit wise, they were just always steady and figuring out what they've learned.

The infrastructure is having a high retention is how other people will see an operation and be like, okay, he's got a really good infrastructure if his retention is really high. If your retention is really freaking low, employee retention is really freaking low and people are coming in and out, it's because there's no structure, there's no infrastructure, there's no support inside the operation.

But what most operators tend to do is, well, they were two princesses and they wanted the best cause and They tend to blame everybody else when it's like, no, I fucked up. My operation is not ready for those eight players. My operation was not ready to recruit this many people. You know what I'm saying? So that's a huge... It is.

Welcome to The Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, The Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello.

or your standards are just higher than what they could, you know, fulfill.

um you know obviously we got a ton of uh i think we got over 4 000 contractors that are still trying to get the product out but you know we'll get there we're hiring people we're you know we got a new facility in irvine um popping up in the next 30 days where we're going to be able to onboard way more people than what we're doing We're taking onboarding and post-onboarding series.

As you can see, we're putting a lot of effort. I'm going to be doing post-onboardings next week just to listen to all the complaints of where we missed the boat because this is an ongoing new technology, new way of doing business. So it's all new to us. So we're going to figure out.

Roadmap. We really want to talk about the roadmap for Nuva because there's some dope-ass things that Travis has been innovating in the industry. Yeah.

Which is 40 to 50 bucks.

Man, honestly, I'm just happy to... Congratulations on the podcast, number one. Number two, I'm happy to work with Travis because I'm learning so much with him. Work with Tom, which he probably meets with us once a year, but it's okay. Just like he does in all his projects. He just delivers it to us and we work for Tom.

But just working with Travis and right now we had a two-hour whiteboard master session right now and just his point of views has been pretty dope. So... To me, I'm excited about what the future holds because we're solving a huge, huge problem in the industry, which is the customer journey. And if we could keep helping contractors, why not?

Well, the consumers, to them, it's just a regular thermostat, right? They could download the app. They could control it. They could turn it on. They could turn it off. They could put their settings menu. That's the one thing we didn't want to mess with because we didn't want to mess the consumer how they interact with the thermostat.

What we did want to do is build a tool for the contractor to be able to communicate to with that consumer and to be able to keep them away from Google, right? That was our main thing. If you go back to how air conditioning, what happens in a customer journey when the consumer needs you, we all do the same thing. Every customer does the same thing.

They go to the thermostat, they turn it on, and the unit doesn't turn off. What's the first thing they do? They go on Google, they go on Yelp, they go on Angie's List, they go on search to be able to look for somebody to be able to come and service them. And when I started paying attention to that consumer behavior, I noticed that they don't do that in the alarm industry.

When something goes wrong in my alarm, right? I have ADT, you probably have Bell or whatever other. When something goes wrong with it, I go to the panel and if something's wrong, the numbers right there, the logos right there, the company information is right there. That's the one part that as me and Travis and Tom and obviously yourself too came in.

That's the one part that we wanted to solve because that's where the contractor loses the control of the consumer. They go to the thermostat, it doesn't work. And then they go on search and then search does whatever they do. And they just pawn that lead to whoever bids better, right? And that's the problem that we wanted to solve. And that's where the original concept of Nuvec came about.

So looking at the runtime on the units, we're able to see like, hey, if we do these remote testings when it's 80 degrees outside and we'll test out the unit for 15 minutes and be able to see like, is it pulling down the temperature or is it pulling up? Just with that data, we're able to see like, hey, the unit's running efficiently or no, it needs somebody to get out there.

If the unit's taking an hour, two hours to cool down your house, obviously there's a performance issue and we want to get out there, which leads back to the point that Travis is saying, monitoring these systems and being able to call your consumer before they even know that there's a problem. That's the second problem that we're solving with Nuva.

The first problem was the customer journey, taking control of the customer. The second problem is being able to go above and beyond for your customers, for your existing customers before it breaks down, because look at everybody's chasing replacement leads. Everybody's chasing leads right now.

Now imagine if you're a consumer and a contractor and you're calling the consumer saying, Hey, there's something wrong with your unit. We need to get out there before they start searching for somebody else. That's a huge problem in the industry. And before we keep talking about Nuve, uh,

Tommy, I do want to say the point of Nuva and why Travis got involved in it and Tommy and Tom Howard and we're all collaborating in this project is because we noticed that there's things in the operation. We noticed that contracting is not... you know, smooth, everything runs perfectly. Like there's still kinks in there that needs to be worked out. Marketing needs to be more efficient.

The operation needs to be run way better. Like there's problems in the industry that we all need to team up as young entrepreneurs, right? And that's what, like, that's probably like the dopest part of working with Travis and Tom Howard and yourself. Like, guys, we don't have the answer and Nuva is not the answer for everything that we're going to solve.

We need everybody in the industry that are starting their businesses or had their businesses or see that there's something wrong in the operation to come in and help us out and keep innovating the operation and keep making it more efficient. Because making an efficient operation only leads to more profit, right?

Or out of service.

Or they expand or they add a service thinking that that's going to repair the operation. That's not always the case. But yeah, Tommy, the perfect time will never come for sure.

There's no reason why they shouldn't. There's no reason why they shouldn't. And again, Not always like how you're bringing it up. Like, Hey, the top guy should be fed more and more. The one thing that you can teach people, Tommy is the hunger that somebody has inside of them.

Like those bottom 60% people that you keep saying that you're mentioning that, you know, are just showing up to work, clocking in, clocking out. Those people are just always going to live their life like that.

No matter what you tell them, no matter how much you pay them, no matter what roads you lead them to, no matter what you do, I promise you those people are comfortable living their life, clocking in, clocking out. And you're right. We do need to keep feeding the top performers and innovating the way we... And top performers only have so much time in their day, just like everybody else.