EP: 215 Daniel Simon w/ Coast Pay - Improving Employee Trust and Integrity in Fleet Management

In our latest episode of HVAC Revealed, we sit down with Daniel Simon from Coast Pay, a fintech and fleet management pro. Daniel shares how bringing new tech into the home service industry can really shake things up and make them more modern.

He discusses how smart payment tech can cut fuel costs by about 9-10% and save managers around 16 hours of work annually. Daniel also discusses common problems with managing fleets, like the misuse of company resources, and offers practical tech solutions to keep things running smoothly. Plus, he points out how moving to digital ways of working can not only make things easier but also attract younger, tech-minded folks to the industry.

3 Key Takeaways:

• Technology as a Transformative Tool: Adoption in traditional industries like HVAC can drive substantial cost savings and efficiency.
• Preventing Resource Misuse: Implementing stringent controls and smart technologies can curb unethical practices, protecting business interests.
• Cultural Shift in Industry: Young entrepreneurs are key to driving change, showing a strong inclination towards integrating modern solutions in family-run businesses.

Learn more about managing your fleet’s expenses and how Coast Pay can streamline your fleet and improve company culture. 

Find Daniel :

On The Web: www.coastpay.com
E-mail: shohini@coastpay.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coastpay
Twitter: twitter.com/coastpayments

Join Our Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed
Presented By On Purpose Media: https://www.onpurposemedia.ca/
For HVAC Internet Marketing reach out to us at info@onpurposemedia.ca or 888-428-0662



Sponsored By:
Chiirp: https://chiirp.com/hssr
Elite Call: https://elitecall.net
On Purpose Media: https://onpurposemedia.ca 

Transcript

Daniel Simon: 0:02

They're solving like a real problem that people have, which is that you need to make sure that you've got the control when you're giving your field personnel, the company credit card.

Thaddeus Tondu: 0:12

Welcome to another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed with Thaddeus and Evan. Where we have good conversations with good people any good conversation worth having is worth having drunk. Today we have on Daniel from Coast Pay and a couple things we're gonna talk about. One of the things that that I like in terms of the trailblazer and the FinTech, some of the stuff and the experience that you've had in doing what you do is phenomenal. I can't wait to dive into some of that in terms of positioning yourself doing a buy now pay later series funding. Having a big exit on top of that. So you know what you're doing in terms of the technological space, transforming that moving into fleet management with some of the technology that you guys have at first, actually, I think one of the first topics that we've had or guests to be able to talk to this on the show. So we're gonna talk about optimizing fleet efficiency for HVAC operations, leveraging data financial strategies. One thing too that I'm excited for is the horror stories that are going to come out of credit cards gone bad with employees. So looking forward to diving into some of that. But of course, our show would not be possible without our sponsors. I need no particular order. Chiirp, Elite Call, and On Purpose Media and Evan's going to read them all.

Evan Hoffman: 1:14

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Thaddeus Tondu: 1:46

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Evan Hoffman: 2:10

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Thaddeus Tondu: 2:41

All

Evan Hoffman: 2:41

right.

Thaddeus Tondu: 2:44

Welcome Daniel to HVAC Success Secrets Revealed, I promise we are generally more professional than this in terms of our show and what happens, but hey, you know what? This is the joys of going live, and sometimes it doesn't always go as you intended.

Daniel Simon: 2:57

Whether I believe it or not, as to how professional you guys generally are, I will say that I'm very happy to be here for having me.

Thaddeus Tondu: 3:02

Awesome. For having us on. Walk us through your journey. I know you've got a pretty big background in the Buy Now, Pay Later, and then transitioning into So walk us through a bit of your journey and your story.

Daniel Simon: 3:13

Yeah,

Thaddeus Tondu: 3:13

for

Daniel Simon: 3:13

sure and again I'm really happy to talk to you guys. So thanks a bunch for this conversation. I'm really looking forward to it. came to the world of HVAC and trades businesses, like really through a pretty circuitous and like side door way I grew up as a software engineer primarily in services like designing and building systems for investing banks and hedge funds and asset managers. So I had a lot of Wall Street stuff. It was a good career, but I was interested in other stuff like politics and policy and. I figured I wasn't going to get there for my tech career and I had this like a super spotty academic background. It was a high school dropout. I dropped out of a couple of colleges and I figured if I go to a fancy law school, people will think I'm smart and so I went to a fancy law school and it totally worked and like now people think I'm smart while I was there, I tried some of the stuff that. I thought I was interested in working in the government for a while and doing some stuff in hedge funds and really wasn't like finding what I thought was my place in the world and around that time, like interesting people with interesting ideas started approaching me to start like FinTech companies, financial technology companies and so I started one my last semester of grad school called Bread and I ran it for about five and a half or six years after that and I'll tell you about that company in a second, but I'll say it's like a bit of a odd background, like I've done a little bit of a bunch of different things, like in some cases, more of a few of them end up being like really well suited to running a business in financial technology. So both Bread my prior company and Coast my, my current one, very much technology companies like at their core and, everyone in financial services always likes to say that about their business, but in payments, it's like really true and I'm pretty good at designing software systems, finance is a language I speak well from both getting an MBA and more from the years working in the banks, it's a set of concerns that I just understand and actually the legal and regulatory training from law school comes to bear every day in a really complex and regulated industry in payments. So I can sort of like be the best Daniel I can be running a FinTech business that, that prior company bread. Was, as you said, like it's a consumer, buy now, pay later company. So maybe you've heard of companies like Affirm or Klarna, like you'd be shopping online for a couch and you cost a thousand bucks and you can pay for it in 24 installments over a couple of years of 47 bucks or something. We were building a product that was like that that we thought was different and better and that was a venture capital backed business. We raised something like a hundred million and. Equity capital from a bunch of investors and we grew the company to 150 people and we ended up selling it to a bank that does store cards like when you go into a department store and they say would you like to sign up for the company credit card? For a lot of money and it was a happy outcome, after a number of years of hard work now when I left that business like I knew I was going to do something new in financial technology But I didn't have the thing that was like super exciting to me. So You know, like I ended up kicking around for a while and eventually somebody said to me, Hey, Dan, you should take a look at fleet cards fuel cards and I was like, what's that? And I looked at it and I was like, Oh my God and I haven't been able to think about anything else like ever since and so I ended up starting this business in 2020, I've been off to the races. I was just like, I worked at a lot of stuff in the year after I left my last company, like a lot, like nothing got me anywhere as excited as Coast, it's just like, when you've got this type. Massive market in the fuel card space is dominated by a handful of folks. I've been around forever. Like I had like huge profit margins that don't treat their customers particularly well all the time are solving like a real need for a huge sector of the economy with a business model that works with just this like really big scale for the incumbents aren't always technology companies at the core. They're not really innovating all the time on like the value that they're bringing to their customers. I saw that pattern. I'm like, I've got to be able to build something like absolutely huge here yeah, so I've been living in like the trades and HVAC for the last few years, like I completely don't belong here, but like it's been a really fun place to live as we've been building coast.

Thaddeus Tondu: 6:54

And this is actually an interesting topic that I love when people get into an industry that they sometimes don't feel like they belong or they're new to it and they need to learn the ins and outs and the nuances and so you announced that are coming in, in a sense, in obviously the financial systems, the FinTech that market itself, but translating that into home services and specifically HVAC and plumbing is a little bit different of a nuance. What would you say was the biggest? learning obstacle in transitioning from your previous to going into the home services.

Daniel Simon: 7:27

First I'll start by saying what was the continuity? Because to me, one of the things that was so exciting about building expense management software and financial services and payments for the trades businesses was just how much they had not been served by that kind of modern technology up until now. Like when you look at it, like over the last 10 or even 15 years of what we think of as fintech like when you think about the neobanks like chime or, even in the commercial space with like software like Mercury and Ramp and the like, but you've got like all of these companies that have really innovated on creating like really excellent digital experiences to transform your experience of financial services banking, payments, lending, credit, et cetera and they've really been targeted at one consumers, right? And two, certain kinds of companies like for instance, other venture capital backed startups and like large enterprise businesses, but like the trades businesses that make up like such this giant segment of the American economy, have completely been left behind by this kind of innovation and so for me, like a large part of the excitement about building coasts, a large part of what I think is the opportunity of innovation is to take a lot of that same kind of experience that's been developed for like a digital workflow on desktop and mobile web on native apps, et cetera, from the consumer experience and to bring it to this massive part of the economy that really has not been touched by FinTech in a really big way and so even though it is different, even though it is like a segment that like is not like where I come from, where I come from informs a lot of what I'm doing and I'm just excited about that. The size of the opportunity look, the challenges in some ways have been like there's like a variance, I would say, in terms of the degree to which HVAC business owner or their fleet manager or their financial operations or AP person is open to thinking about different kinds of digital experiences in their workflows, A lot of these people have there's like Judy in the back office and like she has a spreadsheet of like all the trucks and who's supposed to be driving the truck and there's a little thing with the number of the car like that's in every truck and like when somebody leaves then like you cross it out with a pencil and like you put somebody else in that kind of thing is like so integral and so like how these people operate their businesses a lot of the time and talking to Judy and being like, actually, you could be doing a whole lot more with your time to grow your business, to actually be more profitable, to spend more time on booking more sales and on getting your guys into more jobs instead of all of the workflow around reconciliation and auditing and all that stuff that could be enabled by technology, right? So that has been a bit of a challenge but it's been something that's been really exciting for us and generally speaking when we show people what's possible they get excited, too

Thaddeus Tondu: 10:11

The one thing I did I mean there's a couple of things here me behind innovations and then you touched on it again is digital innovations and workflows and being behind the eight ball in a lot of things that people are doing and when we think about yellow pad technology and people are using that, like you alluded to in what ways can regardless of what platform that they're using, obviously coast pays your preference. What ways can people move potentially from that archaic world into more of a digital innovation to enhance their workflows?

Daniel Simon: 10:41

Yeah you already mentioned a couple of companies that people are using today as a software platform to enhance their business. You mentioned how your sponsor, Chiirp, integrates with Housecall Pro and integrates with Service Titan, right? People are adopting these field services management software suites to be able to enhance their productivity in the trades businesses, including HVAC but there's other tools that sort of surround that operating system that really matter to make these businesses more effective and at the end of the day, to grow faster, to like actually generate more profit and this is like, why we're in this business. It's to help these companies actually build better and bigger businesses the, a couple that comes to mind that are really relevant and I'll come to talking about those in a second, but but first of all all of these businesses operate vehicle fleets it's sometimes possible to lose sight of that. But if you run an HVAC company, you've got vans, you've got trucks you've got people who are in them, and you need the control and security and visibility and reporting that goes into understanding the total cost of ownership and the efficiency of what is one of the most important assets in your business, which is that vehicle fleet and that means that you need a couple of different kinds of tools. One is telematics, right? There's a lot of companies that provide you with the kind of aftermarket tools, the device that plugs into the data port of the onboard computer of your vehicle and pulls out information like precise GPS reporting, speed, braking, fuel odometer, gauge readings, all sorts of other stuff that allow you to do things like figure out which ones of your drivers are driving safely, which ones are actually creating potential liability risk for you because they're speeding or they're hard braking or they're doing other stuff that would be indicative of them doing unsafe stuff or maybe like you have like smart dash cams that can use AI to tell you if like your guy is actually texting wow he's driving again potentially exposing you to liability you can figure out if your team is actually getting to the jobs that they're supposed to be at, or they're just, sitting around parking a lot of McDonald's, like chatting with a girlfriend or whatever it is that they should not be doing instead of helping to serve your business. There's a lot of great companies that do this, Samsara, Azuga, there's a whole bunch of folks. But it's kind of an essential tool for a modern fleet operating.

Thaddeus Tondu: 12:52

Yeah, I was like, I just remember a previous position. I was at, I'm not allowed to name the industry anymore on our podcast, but I remember they had this and the boss actually had me help install a second monitor on his computer so he could have those little guys up on the screen. He could see the vehicles drive around the city, cause they had a fleet of cars and a fleet of vans and so it was neat to see. But I remember one time there's one guy, he was like, you were going to 160 in a 50 zone. He's what? He's no, I wasn't. It's you're going 160 in a 50 zone. He's no, it was icy and I floored it to see how fast the odometer would go.

Daniel Simon: 13:24

Listen, you were talking about, you were talking about horror stories people get really creative on there. Look, and then the other category is the fleet car, which is where Coast Pay. So look, if you were giving the technician who works for you, the company credit card, when they take the van out to do their job, like you need that security like you want to make sure that they're buying the right grade of gas when they're at the gas station. You want to make sure that they're not going into the convenience store at the gas station to buy cigarettes and soda, right? Like you want to make sure that they're like using the company card to not fill up their personal car, but to fill up the company card, right and there's a couple of companies in the U. S. that do this they're really big they're really profitable. Like I said earlier, they don't always treat their customers great and they're built sometimes on pretty old technology, but like they're solving like a real problem that people have, which is that you need to make sure that you've got the control when you're giving your field personnel, the company credit card and so for Coast, like a lot of what we've tried to do is to say to folks that like, there were tools in the incumbent space that actually help you to control this kind of spend that's happening on behalf of your business but they're built on these kind of antiquated methods, like in the old school way of doing things if you give your guy a fleek card from one of the incumbent offerings, they'll dip it into the the card reader on the automated fuel dispenser at the gas pump that people use at the front of the community store and it'll prompt them with that little dial pad that's on the gas pump for a whole bunch of stuff. Your driver ID, your vehicle's VIN, like your personal pin, like the odometer reading on your truck. Now, first of all, the drivers of the vehicles, your technicians, they absolutely hate that, right? Like they're going to have the vehicle in the freezing cold now they've forgotten the odometer reading they hit 99999, right? Like now your data is bad, right? Because it's just it's not reliable drivers share pins, so the security is bad. The vehicle card which is associated with the vehicle, gets into a different vehicle, and now all of a sudden your data is all screwed up and you don't understand the total cost of ownership or your fleet. You can't make decisions that like matter to your business so for us, like we, we've done away with all that like we've created like a new system, which is based on the reality that unlike the situation when the incumbent products were invested, like today everyone's got one of these. Everyone's got a mobile phone and so we built the system entirely built on top of SMS so we send people these plastic cards. They can give them to the drivers to keep in their wallets if they want. They can leave them in the glove boxes or devices or vehicles. It doesn't matter it works the same way. You get into the vehicle at the beginning of your rounds. You pull a card out of the glove box, you text the card ID, like ABC123 or whatever it is, to Coast we say, oh hey, is that is is somebody who your boss put you in the system with that phone number, yes okay, are you still driving, Mercedes Sprinter van license plate XYZ, yes okay, now we can mediate all the transactions that you try on that card with the policies that your manager has set that apply to you, that apply to that vehicle, the combination thereof. We can look at the line item detail of what it is that you purchased, like what grade of gas, how many gallons, what was the price per gallon, etc report that back if you try to do things like, for instance, make a purchase when the real time GPS of your vehicle that you're supposed to be assigned to is far away from the merchant, the gas station where you're trying to make a purchase, we can decline that, we can flag that why are you trying to make a purchase that's more gallons than what your fuel gauge says is empty in the gas tank at the time that you're making the purchase decline that, flag that, restrict that all that sort of stuff that's really designed to give you precise control and the reason why this is important In addition to allowing you as manager to focus more on running your business. It's also because you have these employees and the large majority of them are, like, trustworthy, loyal personnel they're there to do a good job and to help you to build your business, to get paid for it, and you can count on them. But there's always going to be some that aren't like that there are always going to be some that are going to try to take advantage, right and like you live in an environment now where there isn't trust even with you and like the good employees that you have because you're always like second guessing them and you're always asking like are you actually doing what's right for the company are you trying to take me for a ride giving you the technology tools to monitor that to like see that really easily and to understand that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing can actually lead amplify the trust that's in your company so that like it's just like a better place for people to work because like you know the good guys are doing the right thing and when the bad guys are doing the wrong thing like you'll know that pretty quick too.

Thaddeus Tondu: 17:39

I love that, that concept. I remember back to that other one. I had a fleet card. I had a credit card, right and it was only good for one gas station and it had to enter in the odometer number and I would just make shit up all the time. I probably drove them nuts but and I remember the boss saying to, to me, it's okay, you can fill up in any picture Canada, basically Red Deer South in Alberta is Red Deer South yeah, maybe the odd one outside of your area just keep an eye on it so you don't get flagged in the system okay, so now you have a medium of trust that you are empowering to your people where you set that GPS radius man that's just, especially if people take their vehicle home, right? Now, some people, there's an argument there too. Do you put, do you love to take your vehicle home, park it on the road or do you have to put it in the shop every time, right? Now, different argument different thing, but I love the ability to be able to do that.

Daniel Simon: 18:21

Yeah. And by the way, just a couple of things on that. Like one like we see our customers doing it all over the map. Like some of them have all the vehicles in the depot or the lot at the end of the day. Some of them, the employees take the vehicle home. The product works really well in both cases because you can allow people, for instance, to only use the card during their work shift. So you can set up like different like times that if you try to use it, like on a Saturday morning, it's just not going to work, and then it's fine and but if you're trying to use it during your working hours, it'll work okay. We also with that GPS are able to make sure that people are doing things that like make sense with regards to their vehicle, because the stuff that you see, and you talked about horror stories earlier, like people do wacky stuff like in short like it. What I like to tell folks, like people do active stuff, right? Like you will see people filling up the gas tank of the commercial vehicle with the commercial credit card and then the wife is behind in the family car and they'll fill it up in the same transaction. If they had like a limited number of authorizations in order to try to get around those restrictions or like a variation of the same thing is you see people like putting like a bladder, like on the gas tank of the vehicle and then overfilling the gas tank. So they have the access and they'll sell it to somebody else or they'll just simply put in the commercial credit card into the gas pump and they'll sell the gas at some discounts and the guy behind them, wine pocket themselves and obviously the company gets billed for it and it's wild and the thing about it that's so funny to me is there's so much energy and creativity that goes into that. You wish that people would put that towards like doing their jobs well, of just like trying to scam the boss. It's these are creative, talented people, clearly, if they're coming up with this stuff.

Thaddeus Tondu: 19:56

It's funny when people like criminals, I guess in this case they are stealing from you, legitimately stealing from you they would label as a criminal, the creativity that they come up with. It just blows my mind. I like guys, just be good and guess what? Now here's another alternative going back to the old trust system. If you have a good company culture with the buying, and you would think that would reduce and eliminate some of these issues, or is it mainly in organizations that have shit, that have shitty cultures.

Daniel Simon: 20:22

I honestly think I'll at the end of the day, like if you're running a business and I've run a couple, like over the course of the last like dozen years, Why? The fundamental bedrock of all of your operating activities is the culture that you're building at the end of the day and that translates into who it is that you're hiring, what sorts of behaviors you're looking for, encouraging, rewarding punishing among your personnel, what are the values that you are emphasizing actually matter to you and like your employees will hear that, like you, you repeat it, you emphasize it, you make it part of your identity as a business. That is the foundation like without that, like you can have like as many software tools as you want like you're not going to build like a sustainable workforce that's going to drive value for you and your company, like over a long period of time, if you don't invest in that foundation once you've built that foundation, like you have to be building on top of it and that's where the software comes in and that's where the tooling comes in. Because again, like if you build that foundation, the large majority of your team is going to be with you, is going to be looking to build value for you, is going to be looking to help your customers, right? So that you can continue to serve them over a really long period but there's always gonna be like, you never get it 100 percent right and the problem with not getting it 100 percent is that you can have 3 or 4 percent of the people that you hire, or the people that you bring on board not be right for the team but the amount of time that you spend having to create a whole apparatus to monitor, to avoid the damage that three or 4 percent can do can just suck away like all of the energy that you would rather be spending building your business, like being more profitable, right? Like that's where the software tools come into play, but you're absolutely right. If you don't have that foundation of a culture to begin with, then like none of the rest of this stuff actually matters.

Thaddeus Tondu: 22:14

Yep. And look, here's the other part to it. In the call that we had prior to you coming on, you mentioned roughly it was like a 9 to 12% savings on average by coming in with a better fleet management system. If you're saving 9 to 10, 9 to 12% of your fuel cost, depending on how much you have, you can actually then either put that out to your bottom line, or if you want to enhance your culture, give that back to your people, folks.

Daniel Simon: 22:35

Yeah, this is that, like why would you choose to spend inefficiently like that the deficiencies that you gain allow you to invest in your team, allow you to like to your point like actually make a larger profit, or allow you to invest on growing your business by the way, where those like nine to 10 percent or more savings come from, it comes from a few places with Coast one, we have a great partner network this is not the most important thing, but it's worth mentioning at least in the United States, I know that you guys but at least in the United States Coast customers, will get not only two cents per gallon anywhere they buy as a rebate back from Coast, but if you go to one of our partner stations if you go to any ExxonMobile, they have more than 10, 000 locations, you'll get another couple of cents off per gallon if you go to any 7 Eleven or Speedway. You'll get an additional 0. 05 off per gallon for a total of 0. 07 off. If you go to any KC's or racetrack, you'll get up to 6 percent 0. 06 off per gallon that's the savings but the other part of it is two things one, on is you mentioned before that you used to have a fleet card where you would go to one particular station right, Coase is built on top of the Visa network. It works everywhere Visa is accepted, which basically means it works everywhere, right? So that means that like you can go to wherever gas is cheapest as a driver, or more importantly, you can go to wherever is most efficient for your routes for the day so you can focus on getting more work done and not having to find a gas station that accepts your particular product.

Thaddeus Tondu: 23:57

That's a huge thing cause I remember that, like going back to that one gas station and if it wasn't anywhere close, for me, it was easy. It was three blocks away from my house. So every time I came home and I know when to fill up, I just filled up right then and there not everybody out and about is that lucky and so it's a huge thing.

Daniel Simon: 24:12

Really important and by the way look, even when it's right next to your house, like sometimes like you've got a day where you've got to be all over the place, right? And like you just have to fill up someplace and you don't want to be like stuck there or having to or pay out of your own pocket and do the reimbursement or whatever you want to have the tools to do it Coast's partnership with Visa and Visa have been incredible partners to Coast, by the way, I should say like they've been really good active in helping us develop this technology like that means a lot for our customers but the last thing that I'll say is it's just around the controls that I was talking before, the visibility, the security, like what's funny is so when a customer applies to use Coast, like they go onto our website, they put in some information about their business one of the things that we ask them is how much do you typically spend on fuel in a given month and they put in a number and then they'll get on board with Coast and I'll see that they're not spending as much as I said that they put on the form and I'll be like, what's going on? And so I'll yell at my head of sales and my head of sales will yell at the account executive who booked the deal and that person will go and call the customer and they'll be like why haven't you onboarded your fleet? Why are you spending less than you said that you spent and they're like no. We onboarded the whole fleet. It just turned out that we were getting totally fleeced by our employees before we like started using costs so like the savings come from like a whole number of different places, the rebates, the universal acceptance and convenience around that, like both in terms of time and mileage as well as the price of gas and from the security and visibility to prevent the abuse and inefficiency which to your point those are savings that you can spend towards growth, towards your people, or towards your profit.

Evan Hoffman: 25:37

100% and even just the brain power of it to forget that part, to just not have to think about it anymore. To be able to let go of it, know that this is getting taken care of, know that your funds are not being taken from you in an inappropriate way, or no one's abusing it to just free up that brain power, be able to think about the things that are actually important to you and how to grow your business and where to move your business forward and now I can have this relationship or grow this relationship or put time into my employees and train them and yeah, it's incredibly impactful.

Daniel Simon: 26:05

We have customers who, before they started using Coast, like they would like on a nightly or at least a weekly basis go into the lot and Write down the odometer readings of all the vehicles and do the math on miles per gallon and be like, is this making sense? Or is this something that's going wrong and if you start an HVAC business, and you're trying to serve your customers and you're trying to build some.

Evan Hoffman: 26:26

That's something I can see you doing, by the way.

Thaddeus Tondu: 26:30

I actually used to do that. I used to every fill up. I wanted to know what my my mileage was, I was gonna say liters per hundred kilometers, but I was like, no, wait a second most people watching, I guess I actually used to write that down. I was curious I stopped on my, I stopped on the truck. I'm like, okay, I know that the computer is one liter per hundred kilometers off.

Daniel Simon: 26:47

It's not what these people signed up to do this business for, right? No one wants to do that. That's not fun so it's, to your point if we can prevent people from having the need to do that kind of work by, to your point freeing up their minds to think about their business. Then I think we're creating value for our customers and frankly, hopefully helping them have not as bad of a time.

Thaddeus Tondu: 27:09

You're also creating efficiencies too, right? You're saving time by freeing that up. You don't have somebody going in and getting the odometer and punching it into an Excel sheet you have to compute what your mileage is on a vehicle and yada, yada, yada. It's just there. Now that saves time, they pull up the report oh, lo and behold, it's there. Now they're saving a bunch of time perfect segue into the random question generator.

Evan Hoffman: 27:31

Alright,

Thaddeus Tondu: 27:31

so

Evan Hoffman: 27:31

Daniel, we got three random questions here for you. They have nothing to do with anything that we've been talking about you don't get to know what they are before you hear them. So you get to choose what's behind door number one, two, or three.

Daniel Simon: 27:42

Door

Evan Hoffman: 27:42

number

Daniel Simon: 27:43

three.

Evan Hoffman: 27:43

Why is that?

Daniel Simon: 27:44

I just figured door number one and two are just patsy setups the real prizes behind door number three.

Evan Hoffman: 27:51

All right. What's your ideal Saturday look like?

Daniel Simon: 27:53

Oh, wow. Okay. This is going to be like super boring. I'll tell you what my actual Saturdays look like right now. Which is my actual Saturdays are I wake up open up my laptop, answer emails for about eight or nine hours, and then probably go out and have some bourbon with my friends and then I can go to sleep. So I'm not the most interesting guy these days, but Saturday. I live in Brooklyn, New York this is where I am right now. Like I'm in my house in Brooklyn, New York and and I love Brooklyn. It's actually a really amazing place to live. I'm lucky that like a whole lot of my friends live within walking distance from my house, it's like a real great community and like honestly, like an ideal Saturday for me is to walk around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, go to Prospect Park, which is like like the central park of Brooklyn and it's beautiful, like rolling hills and fields and like whatever and and just sit out with friends and drink a bottle of wine in the park and let the day fade away.

Thaddeus Tondu: 28:44

It sounds that ideal Saturday, and I'll buy him some time as he switches his settings over, is actually a really, to me, not the email part, the other one where taking the time off, I don't me personally, I don't work on Saturday. I take Saturdays off. I don't work on Saturday I come back in on Sunday, some nights and I'll do it on Sunday but that idea of just going out and hanging out and being in the moment is a powerful piece in my opinion what's your ideal Saturday look like?

Evan Hoffman: 29:08

Throughout the summer is baseball. My kids play baseball, so my boys are at the Diamond all day long, so it's, that's where we are, and that's all we do.

Thaddeus Tondu: 29:17

Cooler full of beer in the back.

Evan Hoffman: 29:20

That's what we did a couple weekends ago. We were in Kamloops, so that was fun there you go.

Thaddeus Tondu: 29:24

But

Evan Hoffman: 29:24

that's,

Thaddeus Tondu: 29:24

that's why I hang with my kids, right? That's my day to spend without a lot of technology on there, you know what, Evan? in looking at what their pro their product is talking about, what their product can do. How can you see efficiencies in a business by utilizing it?

Evan Hoffman: 29:39

Number one, from an employee perspective, How can we keep them happy, right? When they're not having to enter in the odometer, when they're not having to punch in all these different pins and deal with all the bullshit, it frees up their headspace, so now they feel better about what they're doing. So that's number one. Number two, it's speeding up the efficiencies on the business side. We don't have to be focusing and worrying about are people overspending, are people taking advantage of us and then all of a sudden you get this cynical mindset that's poison in and of itself. To free that up and to remove that makes it worth it. Even if it didn't save you any money, on the front end of just people not abusing the cards, even if it didn't do that, the fact that it removes that cynical mindset from it is fantastic and again, getting back to freedom to just be present, to think about your employees, to think about your people. How can we grow them? How can we invest in them? Look for new opportunities like that freedom to think is so impactful people think that we need more time or more money or more energy or more knowledge or more information in order to achieve and really what we need is more time. Invested time and focus time on what it is that's going to actually move the needle forward we don't take time to pause reflect and think about the things that are the most important and by freeing up this time by buying back this time by using a service like this it does that for you.

Thaddeus Tondu: 31:01

It

Evan Hoffman: 31:01

becomes

Thaddeus Tondu: 31:01

mindless, right? In a sense and so but the other part of that free time is going back to the ideal saturday now that's back on Is that ability to just be away and disconnect from a lot of things? I think a lot of people miss the mark on that In taking the time to disconnect from something and maybe that's what your ideal Sunday looks like, Daniel or maybe you're just one of the folks that some people, they just, they don't need it. They just want to work, right those are a few and far between, but there are those people that are like that, but taking the time to disconnect from your work, to be able to think about the bigger things as well is not quite on the topic of one of the things, Daniel, as as you were, you're coming back in, we started talking about efficiencies and freeing up those efficiencies and Evan was talking about, you came in the tail in there of freeing up time in order to be able to think is in terms of one of the efficiencies within this. But I did wanna transition and go into the efficiency side of things because I think we just scratched the surface a little bit before hand. So in terms of efficiencies created by leveraging technology inside of a business. Yeah specifically for fleet charge cards. What sort of data are you seeing in terms of efficiencies created?

Daniel Simon: 32:06

So listen, like in terms of the data, like I'll say this, like you mentioned a sort of our data around customers saving nine to 10% on their monthly fuel bill. That same study that we did, showed that customers are saving 16 hours on average in terms of time. When they switch the coast from another payment method for their fuel bill and by the way I should mention for a second here it's not just fuel or the efficiency.

Thaddeus Tondu: 32:36

Per week per month or per

Daniel Simon: 32:37

across the board so if you're spending like X dollars per month on fuel, generally speaking for your business, like when switching to coast from a different kind of payment method for fuel, you end up spending 0. 9 X essentially it's just 10 percent less which was quite significant, obviously it's like a major contributor to the expenses of a business that operates a vehicle fleet,

Thaddeus Tondu: 32:59

In terms of the hours, though, is that 16 hours? Is that per person? Or is that

Daniel Simon: 33:04

no, it's 16 hours in total. So in terms of the amount of effort that like people are spending, no, if we actually saved like, half a week from everybody in your business I think that like the company would already be worth a few billion dollars. But we're working on it we're going to get there. But no, what I would say is that the efficiencies come from a lot of areas, including the reconciliation that we spoke about. It also comes from the fact that Coast does more than a traditional fuel card does, because it's not just about fuel. Like you look at the traditional incumbents in the industry and they've historically made what we know of as so called closed loop solutions, which means that they're not running on the Visa and MasterCard rails, as we were talking about a moment ago, but they're special networks that are explicitly integrated by the gas stations that accept these kind of commercial fuel cards, and they don't work for other stuff, right? But when you have like your people in the field, they have to spend money on other things besides fuel, right? Parking tickets. Tolls, car washes, parts, maintenance, picking up extra supplies at Home Depot when you didn't pick them up at the warehouse before, right? So generally speaking, our customers who are coming from an incumbent solution, from like one of the existing folks, for all that other stuff, they need to have a second method, like either like a general purpose corporate card, which is like an invitation for abuse and fraud in this category, as we were talking about before or some kind of cumbersome system of receipts and reimbursements, which adds to, like, all that inefficiency in terms of, like, all the time that you need to manage that kind of program. Having a single solution, but with really precise control and visibility that can say, hey, you can buy this much on gas in a given week, but you can only spend 50 bucks in hardware and supplies every couple of months. Times of month and if you need to go above, you can send a text and the co system will allow the boss to give you like an automatic approval for a one off exception, like all that stuff. That's like way, way easier and requires just like a lot less overhead and oversight. We can also do things like push the expenses in a pre categorized way into your accounting ledger, right? So in terms of like your AP people or your controller, or your financial operations personnel. That's less time that they need to spend on like the reconciliation and closing the books at the end of the month in terms of all the workflows we facilitate and figuring out if something was an exceptional purchase and didn't meet your regular policies, how you get the receipts, the memos, like all of that's built into our system with a native app that we're releasing this quarter with the SMS workflow that we've had from the very beginning to capture all that information attached to the transactions, it just adds like a ton more technology enabled efficiency and allows your back office personnel, not just your field personnel, but like the people that like are actually helping you to run the business back at the office. To focus again on like, how do we get more leads? How do we get more customers? How do we serve them better? How do we do more business with the customers that we have? Because again, that's what you're in the business to do.

Thaddeus Tondu: 35:56

I love all of those things. I want to get into just as we're going to be respectful here of your time one last topic and then we'll wrap and then we'll wrap things up horror stories. I think I want to hear more. Mainly just because I just I love the idea of being able to expose some of this in not so much just to, to paint the light on the people that are doing it, but in case people are doing it to the listeners and they don't even know it, that's something that I want to highlight a little bit more. So hit us with a couple of your top three horror stories. Let's go with that.

Daniel Simon: 36:24

Yeah, I think I, I already touched on some of them the classics are like the okay I'm not going to allow people to make more than X number of purchases with the company card. This is again with like old school incumbent solutions. I was just like, okay like you limit it to one fuel purchase a day or whatever and it was like, the wife is behind in the family car and so before you like put the gas pump back into the device it's just you hold it out, like you've filled up the company car and you're good to go family member pulls up in the family car and you just fill it up in the same thing like it which to me is absolutely wild. There's a saying in our industry, not saying, but a phrase that, that people use in our industry, which is like cokes and smokes which is it's like people use like the company card to buy cokes and smokes in the convenience store. Like that is and it's it seems it seems like so piddling. It seems so marginal, right? It's not like the thing that's actually supposed to move the needle for your business, but it's really like adds up and you can like just

Evan Hoffman: 37:16

Especially when you're at a company like I was at what, two weeks ago, any hour, you got 340 trucks on the road.

Daniel Simon: 37:22

Yeah, exactly. So 340 trucks. 340 trucks, 500 bucks of fuel per truck, right? Then per month, right and then you think about okay, if they put an extra 50 bucks per truck per person, right? What does that actually end up adding up to? It's okay, this is actually a significant if you're the owner of the business, that's like money that you're not taking home,

Thaddeus Tondu: 37:38

I did quick math on it. Let's just say 10 percent of those trucks add in 50 per week on whatever shit. Times 52 weeks, that's 88, 400 on a business that size, right? I just as a random example, right.

Daniel Simon: 37:50

You could hire somebody it's Back on planet Earth, that's like a lot of money pretty meaningful. Yeah, that stuff and then some of the stuff that we see is like really wild like somebody will try to take the company card and like they themselves will have set up some kind of business where they've gotten approved to accept credit card payments and use the company cards, pay themselves, like tens of thousands of dollars, like in the transaction and sometimes like the credit card company we'll figure that out and they'll stop it in advance and sometimes they won't and it's just there's not much that you can do. It's they'll take that money and they'll like, just drain it into their bank account and run away with it and that's the end of the day like the identity theft stuff is insane. There's a lot of like really bad stuff that happens with regards to your business partner or your trusted senior employee using your personal information to open up some kind of account or to use your existing account to essentially run up a whole lot of charges and then basically become scarce and then you are left like holding the bag like there's a whole lot of stuff that like you see go on and again, like I want to reemphasize, like most of the people that you work with. are going to be good people. If you're doing your job, and like what we were talking about earlier with regards to culture, if you're creating the kind of values and the environment that attracts good people, like you're generally going to be okay, but there's always going to be the people that aren't and like that's why you need to create the systems, and that's why you need to have the tools to prevent it because just like you said, like even on that math with just the little bit per truck per month, per year, like it starts to add up, and that's the difference to your bottom line.

Thaddeus Tondu: 39:19

And

Daniel Simon: 39:20

it's to

Thaddeus Tondu: 39:20

people too. Like I know I know somebody who family business and one family member used forged the signature of another family member to create a holding company to be able to put taxes in, which then ended up screwing over the person who got forged because they found out and now we have this big tax bill. Because somebody decided to forge that signature, right? Obviously, we're talking fleet management, but that's a completely different game. That's family that does that. It's wild.

Daniel Simon: 39:45

The really funny things is that these products in the fleet card industry, fuel cards, fleet cards, they're typically people start to look for them when they've got six trucks, ten trucks something along, around that size and by the time you're bigger than that everybody has something. We think we're the best one. We're winning business away from the incumbents but people are like, find out about this category. Like when it's just like you and your brother in law and you're running like a startup HVAC business, people don't usually look for these solutions. What's funny is that like people find these solutions. When they've had their first incidences of abuse that they've actually detected, like somebody like, sold them using the company card and they're just like, oh shit, like I I'm going to need something here and they like, somebody tells them about FuelCars and they Google it and hopefully they find us and like we sell them the product and then they have a good system in place. The funny thing is like a lot of the time It's the brother in law like that's the person that was like doing the abuse to begin with like you think that like when it's just like the two of you there's no reason for mistrust because like you're so close and you can just text each other like where are you and like where are you buying gas or whatever. But like sometimes it's people who are closest to you who are actually taking the most advantage of you.

Evan Hoffman: 40:48

Let's just add it like more often than not are not they're not in enough discomfort to be able to do anything about it motivated enough by the upside of it to actually do anything about it they're just stuck in the middle ground and that's where most people sit Because they haven't realized it, right? When you talked about it before, it doesn't bliss. Ignorance is pain, right? When you don't know what you don't know, it's a painful thing and people end up taking advantage of you and it's really shitty and by the way, if people can't find you online, it's probably awesome.

Thaddeus Tondu: 41:21

Cool. So if we open the phone question before that, of course, if people want to get in touch with you. You can reach at coastpay.com is their account. They also have a Twitter. I know it's a Twitter handle. It's can you do an at sign in Coastpayments? Or do you have to go to twitter. com or is it x. com? I don't really know. I'm confused. linkedin.com/company/coastpay and of course, if you want to reach out via email Shohini not you, this is Shohini you're delegating with the finest of abilities by putting Shohini's email on the podcast to reach out to him. I, that actually Tom had a, he had a post or whatever, maybe I got hooked into one of his ads, I don't really know, about two, eight things that he does to delegate delegation is that's the finest form right there as we do wrap up though, then we have one final question here for you. And that is, what is one question that you wished people would ask you more, but don't?

Daniel Simon: 42:14

Oh, wow. That's a very like abstract, like like meta question.

Thaddeus Tondu: 42:20

And it can be, it could be anything. It does not have to be business. It could be personal, it could be life, it could be business.

Daniel Simon: 42:27

We already got a chance to talk about walking in Prospect Park on a Saturday, so I don't know if we need to go too far away from business, but.

Thaddeus Tondu: 42:33

It's what you do after Prospect Park on Saturdays that matters.

Daniel Simon: 42:38

Exactly. That's where again, like you guys told me to stock up on the bourbon for this for this podcast. So yeah, I think I'm good for a Saturday night. No, I would say something that people talk about the tactics of what it is that we're doing, the market that we're going after, the HVAC business, the trades business more broadly but like I am also involved sometimes as an investor, sometimes as an advisor to other companies in payments, in fintech more broadly and I think that people don't ask about enough and don't appreciate enough how big an opportunity there is in designing financial services products for really specific use cases. People like again, I was mentioning earlier you think about you can get like Chime as your consumer bank app, right and there's all sorts of stuff for consumers and there's like stuff for startups. But like when you're thinking about building payments products for HVAC. You have to think about you've got different guys, they're, like, switching vehicles, they're sharing cars, you need that visibility, et cetera and you have to take a lot of these, financial services experiences and really, reimagine them as workflows that actually make a difference in the particular kinds of experiences that particular kinds of businesses have and to me, that's an incredibly exciting opportunity. HVAC is a huge market, right and we're like laser focused on trying to excel to that market to try to understand what is it that matters to the owners of these businesses? How can we build financial services that work for them? That's not just like your chase app or like whatever that allows you to send a wire or allows you to mail a check or it's about something that like, what does it mean? Like when you have these kinds of employees in the field, how do you build experiences around that with financial services? That theme overall. is going to matter in healthcare, it's going to matter in hospitality, it's going to matter in restaurants, it's going to matter in every other one of these areas. That to me is like something that I'm just like really excited about. I think that as A technology industry. We're just like really early in figuring all of that out and that's something that's like really exciting to me. Probably not the answer that you were asking for, but.

Thaddeus Tondu: 44:45

It is good. It's a, what are the you can spin that off as, what are the industries you're targeting? Why, why this and et cetera and so in a roundabout way to come back full circle, I believe in my opinion.

Evan Hoffman: 44:54

It's a great lesson too for even the listeners of the podcast that you get narrow and deep first as opposed to going wide. I think far too many start to add on additional services because I think that's the best way to grow. It's going deep in their market and trying to get better and offer a better experience in one vertical.

Daniel Simon: 45:13

A hundred percent, you have to be like really great. You have to be really great at one thing that gives you permission to be great at other stuff. But first you have to just really great at one thing.

Evan Hoffman: 45:23

Correct. Obsessed about your customer experience, which comes back to something that you said very early on in the show. When you started to get into this industry, you thought it was something that was very overlooked and the home service industry as a whole isn't used to that. They've been the late adopter to most of the new technologies that have come out. And it's only been recently, especially with AI, that you're seeing it get adopted a lot quicker now within the home services space. But for you to come in and do that now is fantastic. I would love to see more tech come into the home services space because it is a big industry. There's so much opportunity that's here and they are underserved not just in the quantity of the technology that's available, but in the quality and being able to up level the entire industry with more and more offerings with more and better.

Thaddeus Tondu: 46:10

I agree. I agree. just to that point I think the technology that's coming in and adapting is a younger crowd coming up because they, shit, look at CXC and what they have to go, right? There's Amanda Triolo and Brianna Skiffington that were pioneering that and a few others don't get me wrong. But they're of a younger crowd and they're starting to push that technology a little bit more and that's where we're going to start to see some of the change.

Daniel Simon: 46:32

That's something that we observe quite a lot with our customers cause and you guys know this very well, but a lot of these businesses have been around for 20, 30 years, right like the guy who started it or the woman who started it, like it's now like looking to, Think about what's next in their stage of life, and they might tap the kid on the shoulder, right? My very first employee at Coast who's really my partner in building business he, after I think two and a half years working with me, He left because his father was retiring from the HVAC business that he built over the course of, like a number of decades and this guy who had worked with me, he was, young like super smart, talented guy to take over the business and like now, obviously they're a coast customer, that'd be nice to employ, but he's a coast customer and he's looking at. The entire business and thinking like, okay, what are the things that we could be doing more efficiently? How can we grow this business? Not just to grow a little bit, but grow a lot. How can we make it this into sort of something that's like truly efficient, something that like we can truly operationalize into the next order of magnitude of a scale of a business. I think that you see that dynamic across the board with quite a number of HVAC businesses where there are the younger generation taking over and they're looking at the way that things used to be done and they're saying let's take a fresh eye to this. Let's think about how we can do this better. Let's think about how we could do it powered by technology.

Thaddeus Tondu: 47:53

I agree to that 100%. I'll be the first to say thank you for taking the time out of your day to chat with us educate us on Coast Pay some of the ways that people can take advantage of our technology to be able to really streamline some of their operations, save money, save time and just get a better buy in to be able to have their text be more efficient on the job. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom on what you guys are doing to be able to disrupt the industry.

Daniel Simon: 48:15

Guys, it was really fun to chat. I really appreciate you having me on. Thanks very much for the conversation. It was really fun.

Thaddeus Tondu: 48:20

Perfect. Thank you and until next time.

Evan Hoffman: 48:23

Cheers.

Thaddeus Tondu: 48:25

Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all. One person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.