Weldon Long
speaker
182 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Weldon Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I had a client recently send a technician out. The guy had two HVAC systems in his house. Technician goes out, long-term customer, maintenance customer, this homeowner. The guy comes out. Service tech comes out. He finds one little problem and right away starts talking to the homeowner about replacing the system. Guy says, yeah, I'll talk to a comfort advisor. Comfort advisor comes out.
Homeowner decides to keep both systems, not replace them. So they send the technician back out to do the repair. The technician starts doing the repair. He goes, well, I found like four or five more other problems. The homeowner went through the roof. He said, that's kind of suspicious, don't you think, that when I didn't buy a new system, suddenly there's four or five problems?
And called the owner of the company and fired them and said, I don't ever want – they'd been a customer for years and fired the company. Now, the technician probably thought he was doing a favor, finding one little problem, whatever. If you don't do your job thoroughly and they find more problems later, they're going to think you're pulling a scam on them if they don't buy a new system.
I had in my house, I live in an old house. It's been redone, but it's still, the bones are old. The mainline sewer is old. And a few years ago, we started having some backup problems in the basement. Got some bathrooms down there, bar, it's kind of my man cave. And it's backing up a little bit. I call the guy out, he clear it.
And I'm like, you think it might be a problem with the big trees in my front yard? It's a hundred year old neighborhood. Oh man, he goes, I'll come out every six months. He goes, we guarantee no clogs for six months. He goes, you're better off paying me 250 bucks every six months than spending tens of thousands on a mainline. Being an adult, right? And I know this business.
I'm like, it makes sense to me. Well, that worked until it didn't. And I was gone for a week. And I got a big house. And I got, at the time, kids there. And for a week that I'm gone, it backed up. The catastrophe happened.
Every time they flush the toilet, every time they shower upstairs, for a week that I'm gone, because they don't go downstairs when I'm not there, backs up out of the shower, in the bedroom, into my bar, into my living room. Massive catastrophe. This technician thought he was doing me a favor. He was going to save me $25,000.
Well, I ended up having to pay the $25,000 and a ton of other restoration work. This mindset these guys have that they're doing the right thing, they're just fooling themselves. They're just copping out because they don't want to do the work. They don't have the stones to just sit there and tell people the truth. They think they're doing them a favor, and they're not doing them a favor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Plan B? William Sonoma, kitchenware company, a high-end kitchen for people that are really good at cooking and stuff, knives, pots and pans, all that kind of stuff. A number of years ago, they wanted to put a bread baking oven in their stores. It was going to be a thing. People want to bake their own bread. They go out and find this high-value, great-priced, nice bread-baking oven.
They put it in all those stores. They can't give them away. If I'm like, well, maybe our customers want something a little – expect more because we're William Sonoma and maybe higher end. They go out and source another bread-baking oven, more expensive. They start swapping out the inventory. Some of those stores accidentally leave both on the shelf.
What do you think starts happening to the lower-cost one? Start selling hotcakes. Right. It's a concept of compromise choices. When you give somebody one option, you're giving them an all or nothing option. Yeah. And then a lot of times they take nothing. When you give them something else, we all go to the middle. Right. It's just common sense. It's just human nature. So you're exactly right.
You're exactly right. It's an ultimatum, as you call it, which is completely accurate. Buy this or nothing. Well, fine. I'll take nothing. Yeah, I'll get another estimate. Compromise choices.
It's the scarcity mentality that a lot of the owners have. You just mentioned it, financial transparency. And my company, talk to Krista and my speaking company, other people that work with us and HVAC companies, they know how to read an income statement. They know what cost of goods means. They know what gross profit means. They know what overhead means.
They know each department gets allocated overhead. So if everything goes perfect in an HVAC company, The average. I mean, not the elite, not the brass ring guys, you know, 20% EBITDA. The average guy that's doing two or three gets to 10%, let's say, 12% EBITDA.
And that means on every dollar of brain damage, every dollar of financial risk, every dollar of service install, every dollar of everything, when it's all said and done, the company, not even the owner, gets to keep a dime of it. And probably half of that's going to get reinvested into your new trucks. That doesn't seem like absurd profitability.
And I think when people understand it, when they see the books, listen, if we go out and make a few hundred thousand dollars, I'm not ashamed of that either. I'll say, hey, guys, we made some money. They're going to know when we're doing well and when we're not doing well. And I think there's a scarcity mentality. A lot of our ownership, like you said, they don't want to share the information.
Educate these dudes. Educate them about cost of goods and overhead and all these different things. And they're going to see, like, man, it's all you can do to make 10% of this business. Yeah.
Showing 61–80 of 182 · page 4 of 10
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