Episode 2 - Made for This, A Premium Service Shift with Kent Boll

Outline

Ken’s background and how he got started in business.

0:50

How he became an electrician and how he got started.

4:11

How did you find out about SGI?

10:47

How did you get involved with SGI and how did you become a member?

15:49

The first goal of every call is for the customer to use you a second time.

22:58

What was your first experience trying to expand out of electrical and bring in other trades?

26:49

Why he decided to buy a plumbing company.

31:57

Working with a business coach to turn his business around.

37:57

How to use catastrophic catastrophic events to your advantage in business.

41:46

What’s one of the greatest advances he has found through technology in his business now?

48:07

The importance of making the most of every service call.

53:49

Clay Neumeyer  00:50

We'll get after it if if you're ready to rock man. Yep. Sounds good. All right, and I made myself have to take a couple of takes. This is the one thing that's memorized and rehearsed a little bit, right? Yes. The funny thing.

Kent Boll  01:06

Yeah. All

Clay Neumeyer  01:07

right. Okay, guys, welcome to rise to rise. I'm Clay Neumeyer. Thanks for stopping by today. Our guest is the owner and founder of service today, with over 100 staff across four locations across the US. We've got Kent bold, joining us with one hell of a story and some strategies to share. Hey, Ken, how you doing today? Good. How are you doing? Fantastic, man. Thanks again for coming by. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So Kent and I had a little bit of a chat. And we were actually introduced by Guillermo, our first podcast guest. But Ken Scott coined a story, including several coaching firms that you've been with a part of Board of Directors with SGI at one point, right. And really, you've been at this trade since early childhood years, if I recall. Can you tell us a bit about how it all started for you?

Kent Boll  02:05

Yeah, sure. So my dad was a master electrician and master Refrigeration Technician. So I worked for him since I was nine years old. I never, I never really got a summer off. I worked, worked with him every summer, every holiday weekend, you know, you name it, I pretty much did it. And so from then all the way to graduating high school and pretty much worked for him and learned learned to do electrical work as well as refrigeration work. I think I wired my first basement in the house. I think I was 5014 or 15. Because I know I didn't drive there. My dad dropped me off.

Clay Neumeyer  02:50

Was your dad hard to work with? Or what was that relationship? Like coming up? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Kent Boll  02:56

Yeah, he was hard to work with? For sure. I think that's a pretty common thing with fathers working with their sons or sons working with their fathers. So yeah, it you know, he would lose his temper with me, I would lose my temper with him sometimes. It's hard, especially for for a 910 1213 year old, you know, it's it's hard to be in then you're you're sometimes thrown in on a construction site with, you know, grown men swearing and dirty jokes and all the other stuff that goes along with job sites, you know, and, and so I grew up quick, that's for sure.

Clay Neumeyer  03:35

Getting in, what was it about electrical? Because you mentioned you had options there. Right. What was it about electrical that drew you in?

Kent Boll  03:43

Yeah, sure. So so my dad, you know, he was refrigeration tech. So we live in Minnesota, and we have very humid summers in extremely cold winters. And in the refrigeration trade. You're you're crazy busy all summer long. And then it gets very slow in the winter. So my dad would do electrical work more in the winter and refrigeration work more in the summer. Course you know, that all sounds great. But as you know, you have customers and they have needs and doesn't always come in those times that you would like. So what would generally happen is we would be doing fairly good size for just me and him. We had no other employees good size electrical projects. And then we have to continually leave run electric refrigeration service calls and then come back and just keep coming and going. And then when I got older, he would just go and leave me doing the electrical work and then he would come back.

Clay Neumeyer  04:41

Nice. So some really balanced experience there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Did he always know that you were going to take over the company? Was that as planned from the beginning, or was this just

Kent Boll  04:52

something to keep you busy? Yeah, I mean, he never He never pressured me into it. You know, it wasn't like that type of thing. But I think he knew that that was the direction I was gonna go. He wasn't a good technical teacher at all, it was more, let's get it done. We got to get going, we're video we got to get go, we gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go. So you never really slowed down very much to teach me it was more like throw me in the fire and learn how to do it you know what I mean? And so So I the electrical part because we're on larger projects that could I pick that up quicker but the refrigeration never slowed down enough to teach me how to diagnose refrigeration systems. So to this day, I really can't diagnose them. I can't I know the bits and pieces. But I, I couldn't troubleshoot a walk in cooler or something like that on my own.

Clay Neumeyer  05:44

Right, right. So fast forward a bit now. Eventually, you become an electrician, you go through the training, you decide, You know what, I want some more of this?

Kent Boll  05:54

Yeah, yep. So I worked for another company out of high school, me and my dad both agreed to go learn from another company is preferably a larger company. So I did that I was promoted to foreman at 21 with my license. And then I did that for a while. And then my dad came to me in 2005. And he said, I don't want to do electrical work anymore. I'm only going to do refrigeration. If you get your master's license, you can have the electrical my electrical customers, and said, Hey, that sounds great. So I did that I took me two tries when I pass the Masters test and and I started what what then was called boys electric. And I did what most people do and took anything that came on residential, commercial, agricultural, new homes or service calls, whatever, right? And then, and then it and then then the recession of 2008 came when everything dried up and times were a little tough. And then when I joined SGI, and I went to a profit day, as they call them, and they explain their whole concept. And I said I was born for this as exactly what I could do. I knew I'd be good at this. And sorry, on the spot.

Clay Neumeyer  07:10

Can I just slow you down there? I'm not sure that all of our listeners know what SGI actually is. Can we stop there for a second? Just explain a bit about what you were looking for why it became them or you know, you join that group?

Kent Boll  07:26

Yeah, so so it's changed I haven't been part of them. For a while. It was called Success Group International. I think it may be changed to a new name now but electrical success internationals with ESI stands for easier concept is at the time they started franchises, which most people are more aware of Mr. Sparky electric, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, and one our heating and air conditioning. So they own those franchises. And then they own another group called Success group. And that was for people who didn't want to be a franchise, but they wanted to learn kind of how to run an operate like a franchise. And that's where I fell, I didn't want to be a franchise. I didn't, I didn't want that I wanted to be independent, but I, I appreciated their sales training, their their marketing tactics, their customer service, their software integration, stuff like that. And so, so that was my draw to it. I didn't even know companies like that even existed at the time, that whole home service, as you would call it. Today, we look around and there's probably a somewhat sophisticated electrical home service company in almost every city or area. Right? It wasn't like that. 20 years ago that there was a plumbing and electro plumbing and heating and cooling. You've seen a lot but electrical just really wasn't there. I mean, even today in my market, at one day only, I would say 10 years ago, there was about three or four professional home service companies that did electrical. Now everyone does every NexStar member every they all have electrical divisions now and none of them had them back then. So electrical was kind of lagged behind heating and cooling and plumbing. And I think I was kind of one of the one of the people that helped help get that going in a lot.

Clay Neumeyer  09:25

So can I ask your opinion? Can I ask your opinion? What do you think? Cause that lag for electrical in this home service market?

Kent Boll  09:36

I think I think people didn't know how to sell it, I think is what it was. It's easy to sell a water heater water quality furnaces, air conditioners, you know, indoor air quality, but electrical is kind of that mystery of how do you How do you sell something behind walls that doesn't have any moving parts?

Clay Neumeyer  10:09

Like that out of sight out of mind?

Kent Boll  10:11

Yeah. And how do you make that profitable. And then you don't have big parts to sell other than a paneled navy. But other than that, you don't have a water heater or a water softener, or a furnace or an air conditioner, you don't have a big product with high margins to sell. Right? Now, me and many other companies throughout the United States have created ways to do that. And now by I would rather do electrical than the other two. But there's other challenges that come with it. So

Clay Neumeyer  10:48

yeah, of course, so impactful. So jumping back to this SGI thing, because you said something in the in the pre show a little bit, that I found funny. How did you find out about them? I mean, this came down to it, like a simple piece of mail at the time didn't Yeah, it

Kent Boll  11:01

was a pizza, it was just a postcard. So it was during the 2008 2009 recession, I was starting to bid on projects I should do. So I was just me and my brother, I had no other employees. I was building on like large public school additions and things like that. I probably knew how to wire them. But to bid them properly, I probably did. I didn't know what I was doing. And I was so scared, I was just I was so scared of losing money, I would kind of bid on pretty high. And my thought is, well, if I did it, I'll just park myself there and work my butt off and do most of it myself. Thank God, I didn't get any of them. I'm glad I did it. And then when that SGI thinking I would run some service coastal home advisor. Now it was called service magic back in the day when they first started. That was brand new. And that was just coming out at the time. And I signed up for that. And I was getting service calls would come through there. Because I didn't do any other advertising or anything. Yeah. And when I would run those calls, they would be no fixing out when hanging a light fixture. And yeah, I'd walk out with a check or cash for 234 100 bucks. And I'm like, you know, this isn't a bad gig. But you can't. There's not enough work to do this full time, like the volume. Busy driving around just doing little jobs like this. There's not enough work out there for that time. You know, little did I know there's an entire somebody created an entire business model to do just that. So yeah, so anyway, I got that postcard in the mail. That's how I got into SGI. There.

Clay Neumeyer  12:44

You jump into this group? And they were essentially giving you the framework for electrical service success.

Kent Boll  12:52

Yep, yep. How to how to take a that business model, if you just want to run residential service calls, how to do it, and how to how to market for it, how to run them, how to sell them how to collect on them. I mean, even at the time, there wasn't square, we didn't even have apps for credit cards, then I mean, we used to have to, I used to have to write down the credit card numbers on a piece of paper, go and do it on a website and run the card when I was done. There was there was none of that. So credit cards were, you know, actually not as common even at the time, you know, we just think, oh, what's the big deal? You put it in an app and they charge it so easy? Yeah. Wasn't quite like that. So just the fact that I took credit carpets was huge. And financing was kind of just starting with electrical. They know electrical companies had financing. When I started, even the big companies did it. They did for heating and cooling, but most didn't even for plumbing or electric at the time. So that was another new thing at the time.

Clay Neumeyer  13:57

It's come a long way. So I find this interesting, too. If I can just interject there and say like, wow, okay, this is actually a big piece here because you were in a bit of a struggle at this time of economic collapse. 2008 2009. So you started essentially throwing shit at the wall and steam seeing what sticks on some of these bigger jobs. And had you got those that might have held you out from this experience with SGI and this pivotal moment where you realized oh, wait a second here. Yeah, what was that first catalyst with SGI? Can you tell us about that moment where you realized okay, this is that

Kent Boll  14:35

yeah, the so they you know, they it's a one day and I don't know if they do this anymore. I'm assuming they do. It's just a one day. It's really a sales pitch. They're trying to get you to join you know, and I get it. But just when they explained in the past, I love I'm a big believer in professionalism, like I like to look professional, act professional. You No. And they brought up a technician of a member at the time. And he had his uniform on with his name badge with his picture on it. And he looked clean, cut and professional. I'm like, That's what I want to be. That's that's exactly what I want to be. And so I just liked that I liked the professional aspect, what I really liked is, I always had something to work out. I wasn't bidding on jobs. I didn't know I was going to get like, I would rather drive around and go to BNI groups and try to drum up service calls. I'm always doing something I can knock on doors if I had to, which I did for a while. Yeah.

Clay Neumeyer  15:44

Wonderful. That's incredible. Okay, so fast forward a little bit. Me You get so involved with SGI, as you mentioned in the intro, you get on the board of directors for these guys?

Kent Boll  15:55

Yeah, well, it's called the Advisory Board Advisory executive of the EAB Executive Advisory Board. So a lot of companies, I think what happened I kind of got at the beginning, I got in there as default, because during the recession, they lost a lot of members. A lot of the bigger members laughed, because it was it was tough. And, and I was just one that, I think was, I guess, excelling fairly quickly through their programs and through their trainings. And so they kind of put me on at first as somebody to help others. And then through my I think I was on it for four or five years, at least on the on the board. And by the time I left, I was one of the larger electrical only companies even as a member, I think, at the time. And then I would I would help companies like myself that just started out and I would help them get off the ground and answer questions and real life advice of how to do it.

Clay Neumeyer  16:57

Nice. And so during that you're mentioning that your business is taking off now. At what point did you have your first million dollar year

Kent Boll  17:09

2013 I think was the year that we we actually revenue $2 million, which I thought at the time was just absolutely insane. I mean by I thought that was crazy. So I did I did $100,000 in revenues. I had no customers that was just me. The first year I joined SGI, which would have been 2010. So within three years, I went from 100,000 to a million dollars in three years of bread.

Clay Neumeyer  17:35

Wow. So the 10x Yeah, yep. That's incredible. And at that time, do you recall some of the most critical Tactics Strategies? What were the levers that you had that helped you 10x from that 100 to 1 million because, as you know, a large portion of our listeners are in that group.

Kent Boll  17:55

Yeah, yeah. Sales Training, the yes, there's a lot of things you can do by buying products for a lower price. And obviously, you need customers. So you need to you need to advertise and stuff like that. But it's making the most of every call. And I when I when I go around doing my sales trainings now, what I tell people is this. I started out in the I started out in the worst recession, this country, one of the worst recessions this country's ever seen. I had zero customers, I had no money. And it was the slowest time of year, when I started this. I had to get good at sales, I didn't have a choice. And when our next recession comes, which could be tomorrow, the way things are going, you're gonna have to get like that if you're in this industry, it's been so easy. And nobody and it's not easy, but compared to what I went through. I mean, I remember driving down the streets, there were more houses that had for sale signs in front of them than didn't have for sale signs in developments I would go into so trying to sell somebody a panel when they're worried about losing their house. Isn't that an easy task? Or, or smoke alarms, or GFI or whatever it was right? Like, it wasn't easy. So the sales training I went through through SGI at the time was was the game changer and I perfected the sales training. I got through there. I replicated it, I made it better. I improved it. And then I personally trained everybody I hired after that to be able to do it. And then I held the benchmark. So I always say if you're the owner, or you're the lead manager, if you don't have some of the highest numbers, I don't know how you can expect people below you to have those numbers. So I made Sure I was the benchmark, nobody could say it was possible, nobody can say you can do it because I would prove to them I can,

Clay Neumeyer  20:08

wow, I gotta pause you and just say, just say, Wow, for a second and let that sink. That is an incredible piece of information. So you're, you're trying to lead the sales team as well, even from that management position. But also, I think there's been a lot of conversations recently, some of them inspired by me online and in our Rebs group. And my profile on social media is where we have so many conversations about this stuff. And when it comes to that sales piece, there are still a lot that answer to that saying, they don't worry about it. And it's busy enough, but the work just keeps coming. And they don't need a process. Yeah, and I'm with you, man, I gotta say, we need that process, we need to know how to make a friend and talked to people how they want to be talked to, and show them engage, educate on a higher level and make that offer in a way that they can understand. Yes, how you're helping them,

Kent Boll  21:05

there's a couple different levels there, there's one that's just plain customer service, the customer deserves to know what's going on with their home and all the solutions that you can present to them for them to get what they need for their home. So So yeah, you, you may not have to stay at the house to three hours, because you'll get a sale anyway. Right. But it's not good customer service. So that's part of it. The other thing is the efficiency. So companies out there, marketing is getting more expensive than ever, I mean, the prices of Pay Per Click right now, we're literally trying to find ways to completely cut pay per click out of our marketing budget, because the return gets so difficult every year, it's just saturated. And Google has held the market. And so if you so what I'm getting at is you're spending so and then now we have gas prices, we have vehicle prices. So yeah, you can go run a bunch of calls and sell 1000 bucks at each one, let's say, but how much you burning in marketing, fuel truck cost, all those things. Or you could run one call a day instead of three or four calls today. And so $5,000 Now you don't have near the marketing cost, you don't have near the truck cost, you don't have near the overhead because now you need more people to process the invoices, and your your you know, it just burns up so much overhead. So even if it's busy, and you don't need to sell a lot, you're going to cut your overhead costs by running last call. So I don't care if it's busy or slow, making the most of every single call is extremely important for the profitability of your business.

Clay Neumeyer  22:58

I love that. That's so important. And increasing that lifetime customer value through that same process. That's what I seek to write kind of getting to birdstone tier with this thing.

Kent Boll  23:11

Right? Exactly, yep. How you're a multi trade business like mine, we always say the first goal of every call is for the customer to use us a second time. That's the first goal. So if they're gonna use us for plumbing and heating and cooling, and we suck at customer service on electric, we didn't just lose one customer, we kind of lost three.

Clay Neumeyer  23:35

I love that. Oh, man. Do I love that that again is so incredible, guys, if you didn't hear that, right, you're not just losing one customer, you're potentially losing three. So many times we ask guys, okay, what's the Lifetime Customer Value? Yeah. And quite often their answer is the same as their average ticket price. And it's just so not true.

Kent Boll  23:57

Yeah. Yeah. And then electrical. That's the other I would say reason why these home service companies haven't jumped on because the average homeowner only needs electricians once every seven years from what I was told and never really researched it. But heating and cooling is like once every two years and plumbing things once every four or five. So you don't get the repeat like the other two also, unless you're gonna be a multi trade business.

Clay Neumeyer  24:26

Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of our listeners are also looking at ways to create membership packages to increase that upfront inspection. right take care of some due diligence, which honestly is the right thing to do. So I've never felt bad about offering a package like that. And then being able to come in and check with your customers and knowing as you said before, offsetting those marketing costs, getting rid of that pay per click. And just knowing you've got a list of 100-200 Maybe 300 customers. Yes small business and being able when it's slower than to have that schedule controlling, like you said gloat network pound pavement, go visit your customers and visit their neighbors and see if you can take over a whole block.

Kent Boll  25:11

Yes. And to piggyback off that, we did electrical memberships when we were electrical. I myself, who I wouldn't say was a pretty good salesperson, had a very hard time selling on those jobs. And I know a lot of people in this industry in the home service have a hard time closing and tickets on those inspections. I learned a sales process for heating and cooling. And I converted that same process into electrical and we launched that in January of 2021. January, February and March are the slowest electrical months in Minnesota. Right, we had record breaking months by implementing that sale system on club memberships for electrical incredible. So there are ways to capitalize on those hills. I used to think that there wasn't because we had such a hard time. But we have found a way now to capitalize on those. I

Clay Neumeyer  26:21

love that I love this. Hey, let me ask you on the spot. Guys, we haven't talked about this prior. Kent, would you be willing to work together and put that in just our framework as a lead magnet that people could actually put their hand up and ask for at the end of this show?

Kent Boll  26:39

As far as what I guess, what do you ask them?

Clay Neumeyer  26:41

Just the framework of of how you were able to take and build a sales process for that membership package?

Kent Boll  26:49

Oh, sure. Yeah, I could give I could give some nuts and bolts to it. It's it's proprietary of what we do. But I could give some general framework to that. Okay,

Clay Neumeyer  26:59

interesting. It is a conversation I wanted to have with you offline. But here we are. It just just popped in my head. And I had to say so. Okay. All right. So you mentioned having a few different trades under one house. And I know we chatted about this before, can you tell us about your first experience trying to expand out of electrical, and bring in some other trades and what you learned through that process?

Kent Boll  27:24

Yeah, so I purchased a heating cooling company in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area, this was 2017. And I thought I was just gonna run it just like electrical. And in my mind, it was going to be easy, because people when they don't have heating or cooling, I mean, they have to fix it, right. It's not like electrical where I have an outlet not working. But I have 200 older ones in my house that I can plug it into. So I thought it was gonna be this very, very easy transition. And it is heating and cooling is a whole nother beast in itself. And it's really four companies in one. And I don't think people understand that. You have service, you have sales. And when I mean sales, like you're going out and competing for free against four or five other bids. And you're doing that all the time. You know, so you have a service department, a sales department, a maintenance department, and then you have an install department. And I couldn't have a fifth, which is a warranty department, because you have to deal with manufacture warrantied parts, and you got to fill out paperwork, and you got to deal with registering equipment, and you got to do all those things. So HVAC is much much harder of a business than electrical, in my opinion. And there was this big push. And I don't know if it still happens, but a lot of people I hear I want to get into heating and cooling. And I get it because we see these big industry gurus and they're in heating and cooling. And if it's done right, absolutely, it can be a profitable business. But it's tough. It is very tough to do different things a long time.

Clay Neumeyer  29:17

Yeah. So you ended up buying a company. I think you said it was bigger than your electrical company. So that was a bit of a challenge for you too, isn't it?

Kent Boll  29:26

Yeah, I went from I think it was 20 employees to 50 or 60 overnight. And not knowing the trade. Way overconfident about what I was going to do with this whole thing. My business at the time was revenue and 3 million and electrical this business was revenue of 4 million in HVAC. So the challenges of convincing a bank to buy a company larger than you is its own challenge and And then coming in and being the new face of a company that was built from the ground up by somebody else is a whole nother culture. I got very, I got, it was a very big learning experience on business culture. Because I built mine, my electrical company from the ground up the culture was what I built from just me all the way up to, you know, when I when I was doing electrical only, but then walking into a business that has its own culture, and then you're bringing in another culture and it literally class like one thing I like our electric company, we were very, very professional. Like, we didn't swear in the office, we didn't swear in the parking lot like we we were very professional, the heating and cooling company I bought. I mean, it was like pirates in that place suddenly, like the cursing and the everywhere the call center, the economy, just the clash of everything was to say the least was a challenge in itself.

Clay Neumeyer  31:09

No kidding. Wow. So how did you overcome this? That challenge with the staffing and at some point, you must have got the reins of it, right?

Kent Boll  31:19

Yeah, so slowly in graining your culture into it, people are going to leave. One thing to know is no matter how good of an owner you are, when you take over a company, if you keep half the people over the first year, it'll be amazing. So don't think everybody's gonna stick around. Even if you're a good owner and you're good to people. They just, you're not the old owner, whether they like it or not, it's not you. Not the same you're gonna change something and they're not gonna like it. So yeah, I mean, it. It's, it's a very, very it's a lot more difficult than I ever thought it

Clay Neumeyer  31:56

would be. But it didn't. It didn't completely rub you out. You weren't done, you didn't give up.

Kent Boll  32:05

Yeah, like that kept wanting to have a choice. I had to have a big loan from the bank that I had massive payments on, and I had to keep going. I had to make it work and figure it out.

Clay Neumeyer  32:15

Right. And I had in my notes that you actually found someone to run it for you then

Kent Boll  32:23

nobody ran it for me. I guess I'm not sure what

Clay Neumeyer  32:27

that okay, sorry. Ah, Activision, Facebook. $12,000 Hiring bonus for someone to run it.

Kent Boll  32:33

Oh, yeah, I was gonna start heating and cooling from scratch by another company. And so I was looking for somebody to, to I was like, I didn't have the licenses. So I put out a I was like a $12,000 Hiring bonus for somebody with the licenses. Okay, come on board to start heating and cooling from scratch.

Clay Neumeyer  32:53

Just pause that for a second. And then we're going to 20 teams. So if that wasn't enough torture, then you went and decided to buy a plumbing company?

Kent Boll  33:06

Yes. Yeah. So after a year of one of the hardest years of my life, buying this heating and cooling company, I had a plumbing company owner come to me, he was a smaller company. They were doing like 700,000 in revenue. He was just burned out. He didn't want to do it anymore. He gave me a good price. And so we already did a little bit of plumbing. Kind of under the radar. And then we had a plumbing friend that would, you know, do the permits, and he would sign off on the work. And, you know, but we wanted to know we wanted to get into it anyway. And this happened to come across. So I decided to get into plumbing also. Yes. But again, even buying the plumbing, still much easier than HVAC, because plumbing and electrical run very, very similar. Their KPIs are very similar. Their average tickets are similar. The training is fairly similar. That wasn't a problem. And it wasn't that large of a business. So that that wasn't near the transition as the heating and cooling stuff. Oh, good.

Clay Neumeyer  34:17

Hey, I got a question that I never asked before. Was your dad around to see all this or is he still around? 

Kent Boll  34:24

Yeah, he's still around today. Yeah, yeah. He's, he's seen it. He's watched me progress through this whole thing.

Clay Neumeyer  34:31

I'm curious what some of his thoughts would have been back during the HVAC and plumbing struggles.

Kent Boll  34:36

Yeah, he didn't know about him really too much. But all he saw was, you know, you know, just Better Business Bureau award ceremonies and he's started seeing my TV commercials on TV. And you know, and I think he thought it was kind of cool that he was a part of that and helped get it going. So

Clay Neumeyer  34:57

nice. So you mentioned the Better Business Bureau. Is that something that you would recommend to other contractors to enlist? In as well?

Kent Boll  35:08

Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't really deal with much marketing anymore. But I think it's fairly inexpensive to join your local Better Business Bureau. I don't know if it carries the weight like it used to, you know, now there's Google reviews, the Better Business Bureau was kind of a way to get a rating of a business before there were reviews before their Angie's List existed, you know, so it was kind of the only way somebody could really judge if a business was good or not, was by their Better Business Bureau ratings and their complaints, right. And then Angie's List came along, and they kind of started the reviews and people paid the contractor and the homeowner paid Angie's List, to know if they were on Angie's List, and if they were good or not. And then once Google kind of got a hold of reviews, that kind of knocked Angie's List out, and the Better Business Bureau doesn't hold the weight like it used to. Right. Okay, so I wouldn't say it's still not a bad idea. I don't know if it holds the way that it used to back in the day.

Clay Neumeyer  36:16

Thanks for that. So 2018, you bought this plumbing company and told us a bit about that. But oh, 2020 is just around the corner. Yes. How did the pandemic affect your now much larger business?

Kent Boll  36:31

Yeah. So, you know, from 2017 2017 18 and 19, it was a it was a struggle, profitability wise, and just managing this absolute chaos of a company. I didn't, I didn't know how many bookkeepers I needed, how many call takers I needed, I didn't know. And we were doing, we were doing about $12 million in revenue. Wow. And we probably had 80 to 100 employees. And if you don't know what you're doing, that can get out of control pretty dang quick. And it did it got completely out of control. We always were able to outsell our problems. That's one thing we always were good at, maybe because I did most of the sales training myself. But if you have enough revenue coming in the door, you can usually stay afloat. But when that Valve turns off, like a pandemic, when the valve turns off, the bills are still there from the previous couple months, and you don't have that new stream coming in to filter it out the back end. And so that's what happened, the stream shut off. And and it was it's our slowest month already is March, which is when the pandemic started was March. And we were 90 days behind on bill at the time. And I just started working with a new business coach. During this whole years of trying to figure this out, I was with SGI, I left SGI they weren't helping me. I went to two other consulting companies very well known. I won't mention their names on here, but they're very well known companies that are industry. It's not NexStar. They were they were full, I couldn't get into nexor at the time. But there are there are other consulting companies were pretty large. And I joined them and none of them could help they couldn't give me they could tell me the problems. They just couldn't tell me the solutions, right? Like pinpointing areas was I kind of already knew, but I wanted the solutions. And until I got a hold of this, this business coach, this business coach owned a $30 million company in Florida. And once I got a hold of him, he taught me some very, very, very simplistic ways of managing your overhead. And he broke it down very easy for me. And I literally walked into the office and I just started laying people off. Because the pandemic's here, we're getting down to the certain percentages of revenue per department, picking department heads, and this is what we're going to do. And we slash marketing that wasn't working anymore. We got rid of apprentices we didn't, that weren't producing, we had them for growth, but we knew we weren't gonna be growing through the recession. So that wasn't or the pandemic I should say. And I assumed a recession was coming right after it didn't happen. So we just I just made massive changes, massive changes, and then ended up being our most profitable year ever. And that's not even including PPP money. I know a lot of people you know made a lot of money PPP in our industry because we work slow, most of us are out of business, like a restaurant, you know, type of thing. So a lot of people made a lot of profit with that. But excluding PPP money we made the most profit we ever did in 2020. Just by implementing a few of those things that he taught me,

Clay Neumeyer  40:23

That's so incredible. So remarkable. I find business it's so tough that the whole thing snowballs on us, right? And we just keep getting bigger. And we gain all this fat in these different areas. And, and not to say it was all fat, but we lose discipline

Kent Boll  40:39

inefficiencies and just inefficiencies? Yeah,

Clay Neumeyer  40:41

absolutely. One of the things we talk about is something called the law of hindrance, which really comes down to two reasons that our business struggle, one is the discipline to be able to spend time and get get effective, get efficient, they say the deficiencies in the discipline and to is that trust, a lot of times we can put herself on electrical Island, and not find a way to delegate some of these important tasks that we just can't rise above without finding that lever that person to help us do it. Right. So important. Okay. So when you say most profitable ever, like how much did your profit increase by doing this and working with this coach that year?

Kent Boll  41:23

Yeah. So we were pretty much busting even. And I think we finished out about 12% profitable that year ending 2020, which was huge when you're doing you know, but we thought we dropped down in revenue, because we weren't doing as much. So we were about 10 million, I think is where we ended 2020 was about 12 million, or sorry, 10 million in revenue that year.

Clay Neumeyer  41:46

And that's how many shops there were in just one.

Kent Boll  41:49

So we just had MSP, you have just said, Minneapolis at the time. The other good thing, I always like taking these, what people might call crack catastrophic, catastrophic events, like, like, like the pandemic. And you gotta use those to your advantage in business. So one of the advantages was nobody was hiring. So I wasn't, I was going to implement these changes in my business. And I wasn't worried that worried people were going to leave because of it. Because change is hard. So it was actually I implemented new sales strategies, new accounting strategies, new all new things that if I would have just walked in one day, randomly, a lot of people just left and got other jobs, but they kind of knew they were stuck. And I don't want to say that in a bad way. But, or it was either they felt they were stuck. So they had to do it. Or they knew that times were tough or going to get tough. And we had to do some things differently. Kind of both sides of the spectrum.

Clay Neumeyer  42:51

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know that many people know this. But change management actually follows a similar cycle of grieving someone's death. Yes, that's how big of a deal this is for you and your staff. Right. So this was a hard time without that. Coach, would you have made it? Could you see if you might have to shut the doors?

Kent Boll  43:13

Yeah, I don't. I don't think we would have any, I mean, I might have done some of this stuff by guessing what I needed to do. But I wouldn't have known how much to cut and where to cut. And so I don't know, that's a good question. Maybe with the PPP money, I would have made it. But without it probably not.

Clay Neumeyer  43:33

Right? Yeah. Yeah. One of my mentors always said, you know, a good mentor. Yeah, can show you what to do. But they definitely need to be able to show you what not to do. Yeah, right. And in this case, having the confidence in someone that can literally tell you, Okay, this percentage, this percentage, this percentage start making cuts in your run with that. I mean, that's a big deal. That's not an easy thing to do.

Kent Boll  43:58

Yeah, you'll hear the Guru's in your, in sales coaches and neck stars and STIs and praxis and all these other companies say, Well, you need to be around 10 to 12%. overhead. Well, yeah, okay. Well, all that overhead, how many are bookkeepers? How many are accountants? How many are call takers? How much is HR? How much is advertising? Where does that 10 or 12% go? You know, if you're a one $2 million shop, that's easy. But when you start getting to the 1012-15 million, you can get burnt up with very quick inefficiencies that you see with your technicians can also come in in the office too.

Clay Neumeyer  44:38

Of course, of course. I want to bring up another. It's a common thread that I see amongst electricians especially. I see people get to this seven, eight, maybe 10 staff, and then something happens, there's a change and maybe it's a change that they themselves don't make as the owner, but a lot of guys then dial it back and go Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I went there. I'm not doing that again. Yeah, what do you think is one of the biggest pieces for a strategy or tactic and the difference between those that find their way through that threshold and those that don't?

Kent Boll  45:19

Price see it a lot. As I see a lot of smaller guys, the owners saying I want to get out of the truck, I want to get out of the truck. And they delay it. Because they know they're going from a revenue producer to an overhead. And I had a very big struggle with that, too. Because when you're that small, you're probably making pretty good, hopefully, you're making pretty good money in the truck. But let's just say you're paying yourself $100,000 Just as a round number, to take your revenue out. And then your $100,000 of salary, and put it into overhead and take your revenue away, you're running in your truck. And most owners are usually the better salesperson, usually, they're usually the hardest working, they usually run the most calls. So you're taking your best technician, usually out of the field, and then you're putting 100,000 or whatever you pay yourself dollars on your overhead. That's a huge, huge change in your small little business. And what ends up happening is they do that, and then the profits go down, the revenue goes down, they start losing money. They start, right, and then you start freaking out. It's like and then they probably are like this doesn't work. What what well, they jump back in the truck, they fix it. And they're so scared to do it again, is my guess. Because I can see that's what happened. That's a plumber that I bought his plumbing company exact same thing. That's what happened to him. Right? Well, it's scary. It's very scary. I remember being there, making that leap of faith that jump. And if I would have known what I knew now, not necessarily business wise and running a larger company just knowing exactly what to do day one I was out of that truck, not only would I have not been an overhead I would have still been producing, I would have probably built some amazing structure to grow my business even better and more profitable. But at the time, we didn't have the technology we did now we didn't have cloud based software. We didn't have zoom. We didn't have slack. We didn't have WhatsApp, we didn't have I don't even know if we had texting much at that time. But like we didn't have we had to make it so easy. Like it is today. To manage your technicians and do it in a way where you're not. You are not an overhead. You're still a producer, but you're out of the truck.

Clay Neumeyer  48:07

Yeah, that's incredible. Now, you mentioned technology. I know we talked about this before, are you able to share? And I'll leave this open ended for you. Are you able to share one of the greatest advances maybe that you've found help with through technology in your business now?

Kent Boll  48:23

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious after the pandemic, but Zoom is amazing. I mean, I am on Zoom. And look, we wouldn't have this conversation, right? This wouldn't be happening, right? In Facebook, these Facebook group you can the stuff that only SGI and NexStar used to teach, you can get for free on these Facebook groups like it's crazy the information you can get for free. People in this industry are getting Why not all of it's good advice, by the way. But I will also argue that some of these businesses like SGI or NexStar, some of their coaches don't know what they're talking about either all the time. So don't think like what they say is gospel because I've heard many different things that were I'm just like, No, don't don't do that. Don't. I know your coach told you that we don't do that. But there's so much free information out there. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Clay Neumeyer  49:22

I think it's overload too, though.

Kent Boll  49:25

It's almost a little too much. And then you have contradicting people within that. And before you had you had two places to go. Yes. Yeah, you're next door. That's it. That's all. Yeah, keep it simple for franchise.

Clay Neumeyer  49:36

Yeah, we did this exercise within our group within the Rebs group where we're zone alive. And I literally said, Look, guys, I'll show you how to increase sales in your small business. And we went to Google and we've typed and typed in how to increase sales in my small business and we had about 7 billion results in half a second. Yeah, in half a second. Right. This stuff just comes up And the point I was making is it's not always the strategy. And this is something this is borrowed. Actually, I think Tony Robbins might have said at first, but kind of the three s rule where we've got strategy, story and state. And they're all very important to this piece of the pie. But people tend to get it backwards. And and where do you see this? As we look for the next shiny object? Yeah, get that shiny object system out of those 7 billion results. What's the next sales strategy I need? Instead of maybe having the discipline to first manage your state? Get your story, right? Hey, we can do this, right? Because the two most powerful words in the English language are I am, whatever follows is with the people. And we've got a handful of clients. Of course, you know that, with the people we've helped so many that are overcoming their little red team, we call it, it's just that little voice they're hearing that's they're shutting themselves down itself defeat. Yeah, before they give themselves a chance to exercise a process, believe in yourself, have the confidence to just run the play, and not just run it once. Let's run it 2030 4050 times and then see what worked in what did where we did improvements, such as definitely,

Kent Boll  51:15

definitely, in making them late goes back to what I originally did was making the most of each call. Because when I was on the advisory board, I would get phone calls, I was one of the first people to really run TV commercials. And so everything I hate how I want to go on TV, I want to do TV commercials I want to do TV commercials are still extremely expensive, and then not near as good as they used to be because now we have Netflix and all this other stuff. But I would ask well, what's your average ticket and your closing rate? And you know, they'd be like, oh, you know, we're we're at 70% closing rate. And we're at like, $800 average ticket, and I said you can't afford to go in. In fact, you don't need more calls. You just need to run the calls, you have better. And you don't have to spend a dime extra. And then they would say, Well, what do I need to do? I mean, we need to get trained, nor do I get training. And that's where I had a problem. Because there really wasn't much at the time that I endorsed.

Clay Neumeyer  52:20

Yeah, yeah, of course, and staying on that thread. Now, you've helped various groups and contractors in house with some sales training, is that right?

Kent Boll  52:30

Yeah, yeah. So that's actually ended up getting kicked out of SGI, because I was doing sales training for members conflict, and they didn't like that. And I actually, I actually volunteered to do the sales training for SGI, and they didn't want me to do it. And I'm like, well, your training sucks. So either, I'm not gonna tell people to go to your training when it sucks. They're coming to me asking me for training. And I'm not just going to do it for free. So yeah, I'm gonna charge people to do it. And so that's how it kind of all started. And yeah, so I do fly around I go to I've been to many different SGI people that know me. Some people know there's a big, large profitable tune out in Pennsylvania and guy named Buddy mighty West, carvers in that. And then on Washington, I have a guy named Jim, he runs a business there. Been down to Texas, Florida. I've held some here in Minneapolis. So I've been so busy platforming my business to go national that I haven't had the time to do that stuff. But I do really enjoy it. And it is fun for me to do kind of a side gig now. But making the most of every call is just absolutely crucial. And in my business, we are now doing call by call management with virtual ride alongs with every technician to make sure we're making the most of every call.

Clay Neumeyer  54:06

So you said zoom was pretty important before but this sounds may be even more important to your current business.

Kent Boll  54:13

Yeah, yeah. So a virtual ride along is using I can't talk about it too much. But using some type of technology, not not a video call rocket to like film the entire service call. But using technology to make sure that the big points are getting hit throughout every single service call with a manager watching it as it's happening live. And if a piece is getting skipped, they can jump in. And then using cloud based software. We're on service Titan. You can actually watch them build their options live. And if I know some of the vitals going on in the home, and I know some of the things wrong in the home. I can See if the options are being built correctly to make sure those are, are done. And if they're not being built, I can interject, I can see if a technician is being lazy. I can see if a technician is burning through the call, I can see if a technician does doesn't want to do a safety inspection. I can see it all. And I'm not I'm not going to catch it a month later, after I run their KPIs. I'm catching it now.

Clay Neumeyer  55:25

You're fixing the problem in real time?

Kent Boll  55:27

Yes. And what we found out is it's created better customer service, less complaints, because if there is a complaint, we're dealing with it right now. I already know what's going on about the job, higher ticket sales. And so it's just literally we are literally virtually riding along with every single technician every day.

Clay Neumeyer  55:47

Incredible. Has that changed your training on the front end of that process as well, then?

Kent Boll  55:52

Actually, you know, well, yes. So implementing that sales process I talked about earlier in all three of our trades, and using that combined with the virtual ride  along. Were, were the two biggest the two biggest things. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's also dispatching properly. And we talked about this a little bit too, which is you need a sales funnel. And I can go into that more if you want. But, you know, the sales funnel is something that everybody's got to really look into,

Clay Neumeyer  56:25

you know, what we're about on the hour here. So we'll probably save that for another call. I have a feeling we'll be able to do a second one anyway, Ken? Sure. Yeah, that's a wealth of information. If we could wrap it up and say, you know, what were your top few things, you can choose one or three, you tell me what has been the one thing that has changed this all for you, and that you would recommend anyone else spent time look at do whatever that answer is,

Kent Boll  56:54

um, I would say don't grow too fast. Even though that's completely against what I've done. Make sure you have a business coach or mentor that has either had a business or has had a business larger than whatever you're doing in your industry. Because you're not going to know all the steps. If you're if you're a million dollars now and you want to go to 2 million, you don't know what that looks like, or 2 million or five to seven or 7 million to 10. Whatever those steps are, you got to have somebody who's been there, so you don't fall in the same pitfalls they have. You'll also realize that small things you do throughout the day as you grow, turn into departments later. Like, we literally have a customer concern for the complaint department that just handled nobody ever talks about this, by the way. And big gurus don't talk about this, but they all have a customer complaint department with literally three or four people that all they do is handle customer complaints. And you might think, well, they must just be horrible company. No, they're some of the best companies. But listen, when you're serving 15,000 homeowners a year. Just think if you have one complaint today, like per department, then three delete, you know, you need, you're gonna have no matter no matter what size your business is, and how good you are, you're gonna have customer complaints. I dealt with all of them when I was 3 million, but there's no way I can deal with every single one when we're almost 18 million now. So it's just not gonna end. So that's why I mean, as you scale, the little things you used to do can be an entire department. So the efficiencies go completely out of control. If you don't grow with your process, of course,

Clay Neumeyer  58:53

yeah, that's, that's very insightful. Thank you so much. If our listeners want to reach out to you, is that something you want to make available to them? What's the best way for them to follow you on socials or get a hold of you?

Kent Boll  59:07

Yeah, I think my Facebook my Volkl Facebook pages by investors just can't bowl que en BOLL not be O WL B O LL. And you'll see my business coaching page there. You can message me through that, and I can try to help you whatever way I can.

Clay Neumeyer  59:27

Wonderful. Well, thanks so much again. It was great having you and I do hope we get to do this again sometime.

Kent Boll  59:34

I hope so too.