HVAC Success Secrets: Revealed
Welcome to HVAC Success Secrets: Revealed, a podcast dedicated to revealing the success secrets to create and unleash the ultimate HVAC business.
HVAC Success Secrets: Revealed
EP: 237 Ron Nussbaum w/ BuilderComs - Streamlining Construction Communication
Just finished recording a value-packed episode of "HVAC Revealed" with Ron Nussbaum!
In this episode, we explored a range of topics, from on-call service management in the construction industry to implementing effective business systems for enhanced performance. Here are three key takeaways:
Employee Autonomy and Motivation:
- Empower workers to manage their own schedules, and cultivate a 'hero' mentality for those who thrive on emergency situations.
- Use proper incentive structures to motivate voluntary on-call duties.
Effective Systems and Accountability:
- Implementing structured systems like Traction/EOS can streamline operations and foster accountability.
- Transitioning requires commitment; Ron found initial resistance but improved outcomes by ensuring buy-in.
Clear and Consistent Communication:
- Simplify and centralize communication within your business to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Ron's Builder Comms software addresses scattered project information, saving significant time for users.
Tune in for more insights on leadership, system implementation, and business growth directly from Ron's journey - from Marine to construction industry leader!
#HVACRevealed #Leadership #BusinessSystems #EmployeeMotivation #EffectiveCommunication #HVACPodcast
Find Ron:
On The Web: buildercoms.com
Facebook: facebook.com/ronwesley.nussbaum
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Presented By On Purpose Media: https://www.onpurposemedia.ca/
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Sponsored By:
Chiirp: https://chiirp.com/hssr
Elite Call: https://elitecall.net
Service World Expo: https://www.serviceworldexpo.com/
On Purpose Media: https://onpurposemedia.ca
It was all about developing systems that could scale and we could train people on.
Evan Hoffman:Hey, welcome back to another HVAC Success Secrets Revealed with Thaddeus and Evan, where we have good conversations with good people, sober or drunk. How's that? Cheers to my water. Super excited to have on Ron Nussbaum. Nussbaum? I probably should have grabbed the pronunciation of your last name. I apologize, my friend, Ron. He's a former Marine. He spent a decade in the construction industry, working everything from the jackhammer to running the business. From there he invested in a residential cleaning company and in 12 months took his investment in 5x'd it and exited that company before starting Buildercoms, which if you think of putting Slack and Dropbox together and they had a baby, it would be Buildercoms, allowing that streamlined communication for consumer. And homeowner all the way through to all of the different trades, informing everyone of what's going on and having that communication all the way through the process. He's also the host of Construction Champions, elevating the entire home service space, the construction space. With his podcast there, just had on a fantastic guest that he released the episode of last week, talking about marketing and things like that. We'll put the link in for that show, cause it was a good one.
Thaddeus Tondu:Best guest to date for him. you mentioned some of the communications and I think a lot of businesses and a lot of people misunderestimate the fact of communications and how important it is to a business. Like you can have an average product, but if you have above average communication, you're going to still win because people just want to be heard. It's the second that you remove that above average communication, even if you have a phenomenal product, if your communication is dog shit, you're out. Like they're not going to stick around because that's what people want. They just want to be up to date with things. So super excited to be able to dive in and unpack some of the communication parts of what they do. And of course, today's show would not be possible without our sponsors. And in no particular order, Elite Call Chiirp Service World Expo and On Purpose Media. So if you want to join us for the most magical contractor experience at the Service World Expo in Orlando, Florida, from October 15th to 17th Enjoy keynotes, breakout sessions, four hour workshops, social mixers, an exhibit hall with industry leading products and podcasts. Guess what? We'll be there! Network with other residential contracts in here, contractors in here from some amazing keynotes, all designed to help contractors like you elevate your business. Register now and use the promo code Secrets100 for 100 off visit serviceworldexpo.com to register today and we'll see you there.
Evan Hoffman:Love it. Hey Thaddeus.
Thaddeus Tondu:Yes, Evan.
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Evan Hoffman:Love it. And last but not least, we have On Purpose Media, everything from your SEO, your PPC, and of course the website. We love working with home service companies and helping them out in any way possible. In fact, right before this podcast, I was with a gentleman from. California talking about a second opinion audit. So go ahead and head over to onpurposemedia.ca/second-opinion, where we can give you some, a breakdown of some simple questions that you can bring back to your marketing company to help you move the needle forward. And if you decide to stay working with them, fantastic. If you're looking for other options, we'd be happy to be part of that conversation too, but head over to onpurposemedia.ca and just make sure that your marketing is on point.
Thaddeus Tondu:Hey, welcome Ron.
Ron Nussbaum:Thanks hey, great to be here.
Evan Hoffman:Awesome. Ron, thank you so much for taking some time to join us today. Truly appreciate it. Walk us through your journey. You you joined the Marines, came home, needed something to do, got into construction walk us through a little bit of the journey here and one, thank you for your service. And serving the country not our country cause we're up in Canada, but we're in America. Yeah. Walk us through your journey.
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I was, I got out of the Marine Corps in 2010 and that it wasn't my plan to get out, but my knee got blown out and that's where, that's what the plan was. So I was sitting around trying to figure out what does this look like? In 2010 Craigslist is where you went looking for a job, or at least. Old Marines that didn't have anything better to do went on Craigslist to look for employment. And I found this foreman in training ad I kept staring at it for two weeks. I had never done construction work. I worked in auto body before the Marine Corps. And one day I was looking in the mirror and I was just like, damn it Ron, if you want to go be a foreman, you can, like you're a United States Marine. And I applied. And I got the job because I was a Marine, actually. Everybody else that was being hired were fresh out of construction management school. And here I am. I have, I'm a grunt out of the Marine Corps with barely a high school diploma and one tour to Iraq. Throw me on the job site. And the guy loved, he loved that I was a Marine. And he said some of the best people he ever knew were Marines. And I hit the job site running with a lot to prove, cause I didn't know anything. All I knew is I could show up and work my ass off every day. And run circles around everybody else just by doing that. As long as I was willing to absorb the information and learn about construction. And over the next decade, is I made my whole life about that. Like literally showing up working 80 100 hours a an hour every day, To and from listening to personal development books to become just a better person and at the same time, master the construction industry, which then led me to moving into leadership roles and then into management as well, operations management and leadership of the company. And it all came from the fact that I knew I could learn everything and outwork everybody. And. That's what led us to here where we are now. Same thing with the cleaning company. It was a great opportunity and I just pulled the trigger and was like, hey, we can do amazing things here just by putting systems in place. I'm sure a lot of the listeners out there, like your phone might be ringing off the hook, but everything's chaos. We walked in to have the first meeting with the lady that owned this cleaning company and it was complete chaos, but her phone never stopped ringing. And I was like, so it's all reoccurring, it's all residential and your phone don't stop ringing. And she's yeah, it's a disaster. Like I need my phone to stop ringing. I said, no, hold on. That's the positive in this business right there. And all we did was just come in and put in all the systems in place, made it easy, put it in a position where you could either hire a general manager or run it yourself. The guy we actually sold it to worked a remote job. Instead of working from his house, he just worked from the office that the cleaning company was at. And ran the cleaning company and did his remote job. And he's it was, it's a match made in heaven for him. But it's all about just building those systems processes, getting that stuff in place. And that's where Builder Comms was born out of it is I got tired of getting my ass chewed standing in driveways by customers and not knowing everything that was going on. And. Everything I tracked it all back to came to communication. And one night I was laying in bed and it just hit me like a train. If I just had a piece of software that got all the communication in one place and then worked as like air traffic controller to be able to direct this traffic, get the right people talking to the right people, this could solve this problem. I got out of bed. I put, I call it a haphazard at best PowerPoint presentation. So like I'm the software guy that doesn't necessarily understand how to work all the software. I'm getting better, but here we are. And that's one of the magical things about what we do is because I only build simple shit. Like Builder comms is simple to use because. I had to be able to use it. Like it only made sense that if you can use Facebook, you should be able to use a piece of software. And that was our mantra from the beginning is like, we just need it to be as easy as Facebook. If somebody can send a message on Facebook, they should be able to operate and send a message and do order comms. So that brings us here to today. And it's what I do for time. And also I host the podcast. And that's like my passion project now. That's a lot for you guys to unpack.
Thaddeus Tondu:No there's a couple of things in there that that I think we can go down and, I'll go ahead and go with the first one here and looking at coming into the cleaning company and the, phones ran off the hook. She says it's chaos and you've got to put in systems. I mean, it's kind of a two part question. But the first part is how much did your previous experiences, being in the military, being in, foreman to come in now as a business owner, be like, Oh, I've got a we've got to put in systems, what was the, I guess how much did that experience help you out? And then the second part of that would be what were the first, what was the first system that you built to be able to help them?
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah, no, absolutely. So yeah, I caught Marine Corps, like SOPs, like people die if you don't do the shit you're supposed to do. And we have a system for everything and we train on it. Did the same thing going through becoming a foreman, becoming a production manager, an operations manager, and leadership. It was all about developing systems that could scale and we could train people because if it's a system that you can only do, it's going to fail. It has to be a system that you can teach somebody else to do, then that person can teach somebody else to do. So all of my, everything I had done prior, it was a perfect fit for the cleaning company. It was like, this is what I do. I've done this at a high level. We did over eight figures in annual revenue at the construction company. Like we went from a little, a couple million, two, three crews to over 20 million in annual revenue and 30 crews and a couple hundred employees over that decade, and that all came from putting systems in place. And then making them scalable, then readjusting them as you grow, because they break, and then refixing them and then retraining on them. So the first thing, when I stepped into that cleaning company, is what we had to do is we had to get employee buy in. There was a lot of different employees working different times doing different things. There was no consistency and every one of them hated it. So one of the first systems we put in was, we're just going to a four day work week and we work from this time to this time. If you're not interested in that, I'm sorry. You're just not a good fit for where the company's going. So we lost about 20 percent of the staff right there with that move, but that other 80 percent was excited because we just gave them structure and a consistent paycheck and they didn't have to worry about calling in and saying, am I working this day? Because then we immediately just changed the calendar and concise it down to that four day instead of having everything spread out. We just brought order to the chaos.
Evan Hoffman:The people that you lost that jump ship right away is that would freed up the ability to that and make sure that everyone had a full calendar because you only had 80 percent of the staff to fill 100 percent of the job.
Ron Nussbaum:No, I really, the work was there. It was just structured all right. Where a couple of people were like, Oh, I work Tuesdays and Wednesdays, or I work Mondays and Thursdays and Fridays. And I work from 12 to whatever time, like there was no structure. So by consolidating it into one place, we actually expanded the crews. We made it, we took it from a typical one crew running all the time, expanded it into two crews because you think all phones ringing. So now we have some structure to what we're doing. We know we have these time slots we can fill. We can go out and get quotes, fill those spots up and keep the girls working all day, every day. on that four day work week and have two crews actually working. So then you immediately double your revenue. So instead of having one crew, we then go to having two crews. This is like 30 days into it. So 30 days into it, we make the adjustment with the calendar. And then at the same time, roll out another crew that's doing the same thing. So 30 days in, we were doing double the revenue that was done before just by adding some structure and giving clarity to the people that were involved.
Evan Hoffman:That's wild that it was that much chaos guys.
Ron Nussbaum:You go in businesses all the time. This is the thing businesses suffer with is like there's just chaos. It's just whitewater. No one knows exactly what's going on and you can tell the difference when you walk into a well oiled organization. And when there's just chaos.
Evan Hoffman:Look,
Ron Nussbaum:the
Evan Hoffman:thing that I love about the systems conversation and what it allows you to do, especially when you've got the proper training in place on top of the systems that you've already built is now it eliminates the need to hire based on experience you don't need to bring in that skilled tradesman to be able to run it because you don't have the proper system to train them. You've got that built out. Now you can go and hire for character, which is why you got the job, Having that skill set, the values, the beliefs behind it, character that, was the foundation for who it was that you were that allowed you to step into that role and excel, right? It's incredibly important for a home service company to be able to build that out right away. I'm curious with the scheduling component of it like one of the other things that came to mind was after hour services. That's something that for a lot of technicians tends to be a little bit of a resistance point. It's not something that people like doing. They don't want to be on call. So what's your opinion on that for companies that are in more of an emergency based service?
Ron Nussbaum:We go back to whatt I did prior in the construction industry. And we had on cause tax, like service tax, like shit happens. You have to have people go do that. And we came up with a rotation. We were very fit so here's some of the part people don't think you can just be black and white and not be, you have to be an ass. But no, what people really want is they want stuff to be black and white and they just want you to understand who they are and have a great conversation with. So if you sit down with everybody and you get everything out on the table and you're like, here's the deal. All customers need us to have 24 hour calls because if shit happens in their house, they need to know we're going to be there to take care of them. We have to figure out how we can best do this to each other. Right here let's figure this out. What does this look like? And then set up a page structure that is highly rewarded to the people that want to be involved with that because the customers you take care of on the 24 hour calls are going to be forever your customer. You show up and you dig somebody out a shit show at their house at 2 a. m. that customer would never call anybody else. They will only talk about that time when you guys showed up at two o'clock in the middle of the night. Like the marketing you get out of that, the word of mouth, the loyalty is worth paying a premium to a guy to go out there and take care of it. But you have to have some flexibility. It can't always be the same person, but you got to be willing to have some give and take, and then let those guys control that calendar, because that's what we would do is we would be like, here's the calendar people can volunteer for when they want it. We need the entire calendar set for every month and you guys can change. The only thing that can not happen is when that phone rings, nobody answered. That is the only thing that can't happen here. And we'll empower you guys and give you guys the opportunity to be able to control that because that's the only way it can be a success is we can create the box that it has to live in, but then you guys create what that looks like with inside that box and just make sure we're always there to serve our customers.
Thaddeus Tondu:It's actually fascinating that you said that.'cause I was thinking about a previous industry that I was in that will remain not unnamed. Actually no, I haven't mentioned Tony Robbins. So I'll talk about the passenger elevator industry. They had 50 different technicians that were in there. but soon we, I would find out that when I was looking at the schedule, looking at the guys, like they would always be trading, some of the guys would just trade their shifts away. They wouldn't want the overtime. And they would find other people that would continually pick it up. Now they're going to find when you do that, that there are going to be those people who want to actually take that on, who actually want to do that because their life allows for it, or they just want to do it, or they want to be there or they want the extra money or whatever. And so when you give them that, that power and that freedom to be able to understand those things, that's where that magic can happen for an after hours and on call basis.
Ron Nussbaum:You find that hero. I used to call it like the person that wants to be that hero that wants to come in there and save that situation. You have the same thing with like foreman in project superintendents that they want to be that hero on the project. And if you can pair them with the right project, you hit a grand slam because some projects do, they just need a hero. That customer needs somebody that's going to be a hero for them. And that's what you need in an on call is somebody that just gets their high from going and just this service, this level of service in a stress free situation where they step in and they just fix it and the homeowner is so happy about it. And over the top. And then that typically leads to great reviews. And then it gets talked about around the company. Like those people are within your company. You just have to put them in a position where like you just said, it's like they can rise into that because people don't want to be put into it. Cause that same person, if you were like, man, you're fantastic and do call the on call, you should do it. And we'll get you set up for success. They're going to be like, ah, no cause they don't want to be volunteered for it. They want to volunteer for it.
Thaddeus Tondu:And not everybody wants to be the hero too and that's also okay. And understand that. I was actually just talking with our leadership team earlier today, and we're planning out our next 90 day rocks and one of the things that came up is there's some team members that just don't want to be leaders. They don't want to be the hero. They don't want to take that extra weight, the responsibility. They want to show up. They want to do the job. They want to leave, and they want to go home.
Ron Nussbaum:Traction's the best business book that was ever written
Thaddeus Tondu:entrepreneurs operating system. We're running on it. We put it in coming up a year, I think in like November, December. And it's been phenomenal. Are you guys running on a US too?
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's been the catalyst for a couple of different ventures that I've been involved with where we would have never got to where we were going without implementing traction because it just, it brought clarity. Yeah. Around everything that we already knew. So I don't care if you're like just starting out or doing 15 million in volume, Trachin is worth the read because it will bring so much clarity around stuff you already know and stuff you already do, it'll just make it so much more clear on like how much more of a tighter ship can be run
Thaddeus Tondu:And account of that accountability pieces is massive behind and actually let's pivot and talk a little bit about accountability inside of an organization because while you're on EOS, and this is what I love about our podcast is that there's no set questions. We just go in looking at putting in, so if somebody were to, cause we put it in after the fact, right? We put it in almost a year ago. We actually tried self implementing it. It went great for the first month or two and then a year and a half later, Hey, let's try it again. But we hired an implementer this time and it was the best investment we've made for EOS. When you look at putting in if you've come from an organization, you can even use the cleaning company for an example, you went from no accountability to all of a sudden accountability. How can you instill that into an organization where there was none? What are some of the roadblocks or people hindrances that you gotta be mindful of when you do that?
Ron Nussbaum:I won't use the cleaning company because I think that's like a toss up easy because like we, I was the new ownership. So there was no, no past, no thoughts of what I came in and I performed. And I showed up and like I said, we were going to do this and we did it like that made it easier. Not that it was easy, but when you're stepping up for a fresh, like it's a fresh set of downs here, like you're not fourth and long, like a lot of companies are like, that's like in the construction industry. When we started looking at using traction and researching that is we were in a completely different space where we had, Implemented all kinds of different things and tried to roll stuff out and could not get any traction with it or it would fall off. So it was like, how can we figure this out? And we knew we're going to do the big launch. We're going to roll this out and everybody's going to be like, we're just C. We're C 12 months from now. And we were fully committed as a leadership team. We came together and we committed that we were going to do this for 12 months. Every week we were literally going to meet and go over the EOS system, the book, where are we at? What are all rocks? What exactly are we doing? And we're like, we're not going to quit. We are going to do it for a year and we'll see where we're at. And we did it for a year and, a year later we had a lot more traction with it, but we still hadn't won everybody over because you still had the naysayers. You build up this reputation over time, As a business owner and a leadership team, and people just don't believe it. Like it just seems Oh yeah, that sounds all great if we get there, but you have to be willing to commit. So then we committed to another 12 months and continued and things started getting a lot better. Profits start to go up. So then you can take that money and reinvest it into the employees and do the stuff that you've always said you were going to do. So see that's employees can be jaded. Because we've said we're going to do so much and then we don't do it. And then when we implement something like an EOS system is, if you're looking at it from the outside is all they're seeing is, oh here we go, they got your other, here's another thing we're rolling out that's supposed to make our life a lot better. But at the end of the day, it typically makes our jobs suck more. So you have to be committed to every outcome that you're going to create from that.
Thaddeus Tondu:And then when you do that, now people get the buy in because at the end of the day, when you have that the ability to, A players want structure. They want accountability. They want to be measured. They want to perform against those measurements in when you have an organization full of B or even C players, they don't give a shit. They don't want that. They want to hide in a corner because that's what a B player and C player does. But A players, they already know they're going to get their shit done and they're just going to be at it.
Ron Nussbaum:See, that's the thing is that it's such a misconception that people don't want accountability. I want accountability myself. I hold myself accountable. Most people that are high performers do that. So it's such a misconception that in business that your high performers don't want that. They do. They want to know what the target is and what they're going to be held accountable to because most of them want to go over that. They're like, all right, you just set the baseline. Let's see what I can really do cause now they know this is what they expect me to do. like I said earlier, like it's okay to just be black and white about stuff. We have to understand the people we're talking to, like that's our, all responsibility as leaders to be that. That was one of my biggest aha moments through my entire deal is I am a high D personality and a lot of people will tell you. You got to stay away from that. You can't lean into it. And that was some of the biggest mistakes I ever made because people didn't, they didn't relate to that. They didn't feel the realness of who Ron really was. They knew who Ron was. A lot of these guys spent time out in the field with me. They knew who I was and for me to sit down and be somebody else and try to have these conversations because that is what was expected of me was wrong. As soon as I realized it's what people want is they just want Ron to be Ron, but they want me to understand who they are and how do they talk to me. So understanding their personalities, understanding how we can feed into that and have a better conversation, but still be black and white. Be Ron. Let them know hey, here's what we expect. Here's the game plan this is what the trajectory looks like and if you're not hitting that, you're not hitting that. They want to hear that, but you, it's all responsibility to deliver it in a way that they can accept it. And I think that's where that starts to get mucky and people start to think it's, oh, you can't be intense or You can't be this. And because people don't know how to handle that well. As a leader, it's up for us. It's for us to understand them enough so they can understand it. Because if we change, they immediately understand. Like they're like, this dude's not real. This dude's full of shit. But if we stay ourselves and pivot our. It's not even on delivery. It's just pivoting how they receive information in a way they can. Because I understood, the first time I ever did my DISC assessment, I was like, everybody should read this. The Wordard would be a better place if everybody read this and understand who Ron Neusbaum was, and that was wrong. What I needed to do was read everybody's disassessment around me and understand them because I'm different than 99 percent of the people in the world. And we all are, no matter what your personality is, you're different than everybody. And it's up to us to learn how to communicate with them in a way that they understand it.
Evan Hoffman:A natural, tendency to step out of that authenticity when you're first becoming a leader? Because I think that's something that's really common.
Ron Nussbaum:I think it's something that we're coached into a lot when you start to become a leader and you start to move into that, it's always you should do this differently. You should do that different. This is how we do it. It's never this is how we have to do it. I need you to find the most authentic way for you to do this. we don't develop leaders in that way where we're letting people be who they are. Yeah. in directing the outcomes that need to be created. Because that's all we do that's all, the end goal is to create an outcome. And you have to get that person in a position where they can do that. And if they're going to lead people, if you're putting people in charge of other people, you have to let them be them. They're not going to be you. And I think that's probably where a lot of it comes in is that guys try to reproduce themselves into the other leaders when they don't even probably understand their selves by good enough anyhow.
Thaddeus Tondu:On the flip side of that though as somebody who is a new leader and you look up to somebody else and you try to imitate that person. walk us through that cause there's some good things. Then there's some bad things by doing that.
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah, I think leadership is so leadership. I love this subject and we don't, I don't talk about it enough these days. Like I'm out of this realm of leadership, but in fact, I think leadership is like a living organ. Like you're either consistently getting better at leadership or you're getting worse it's just like going to the gym. Like you're either working on it or you're not and if you're looking around the people around you and say you're becoming a new leader. What blows my mind is we have the tendency to take, to go learn from the people that 30 days prior, we didn't have a whole lot good to say about. But now we moved up and now we're going to be like there's this power trip that you have to teach people to overcome. This isn't about power. This is about literally creating outcomes. That's what leadership is. It's not about that you're seniority to everybody here. Going and copying Other people, free willy nilly is a problem. What we have to do is we have to look at what characteristic, for one, you will, who are they as a person? How close are we in line? Cause two to all three of us, not even two different people, all three of us could get up, have a one on one meeting with an employee to deliver the same message. And it would come across completely different out of all of us. How much of alignment do I have with that person from a perspective of personality? Because if you're two completely different personalities, see that's one of the traps I fell into is I'm taking leadership advice from somebody that's a different personality than me that of course they're going to do it completely opposite wrong narrative there. So when I say continued education is what, there is so many great leadership books out there. We have to continue to educate ourselves and then evaluate the situation that we're in you and who's around us and take the stuff that will work best for us in all personalities to achieve the goals that we're trying to achieve. That's what gets lost in leadership. Like you become a manager, you become a foreman, like you lose sight that still your job is to create an outcome. It's to achieve something but now you get the opportunity. To have people help you do that instead of you just trying to do it by yourself for whatever your job was prior, you now have people that get to help you create that out. And that's where we should be moving towards. We shouldn't be moving where I feel like the team should move. We should be moving towards our objective all the time.
Thaddeus Tondu:I like the leadership as an organ part. That's, and then I'll pass it to you, Evan. I'm not, I don't have a question on just the leadership as an organ because you either you're adapt your leadership style to the changing tides of your organization or whatever season you're in. I did a Facebook post earlier today of like business has seasons. It could be stormy, could be sunny. It's how you navigate the stormy seasons lest you enjoy the sunshine in the, in different Times are going to require different leadership style need to learn, grow and adapt. I really liked that part. Evan, where are you going to ask?
Evan Hoffman:Well it's leadership is one of those things that gets pushed to the back burner when it comes to the trades. A lot of contractors that they come into it as an owner, not having run a team before, or they were a service manager, but they didn't even have great leaders in their organization. Because again it's the trades. It's not talked about. A lot, right? There's so many different hats that you're wearing as an owner of a construction company, an HVAC company, plumbing company. I don't care what it is. There's so many different hats that you have to wear. You're trying to worry about getting the phone to ring and then you need to make sure your texts are selling and you need to make sure you're running the calls right. And you're asking for reviews after and did they wear their booties? Did they not wear their booties? And there's all these different things. And then, Oh, by the way, don't forget your P and L statements. Don't forget to pay your taxes. And leadership just gets pushed down so far. And yet it's one of those skills. It's a mother skill of actual growth. You're never going to evolve into the type of business that you want to run. If you don't become more yourself and you need to continue to study it and you need to adapt to it and grow with it. Like you said, it's a living organ. Fantastic points there. I know we want to get into our random question generator. It's one of our favorite parts of the show where it has nothing to do with anything we've been talking about whatsoever. You do not get to know what the questions are leading into it. So you get to choose whether you would like question one, two, or three.
Ron Nussbaum:We'll just go with one.
Thaddeus Tondu:If you were spotted on a, deserted island, what three items would you want with you?
Ron Nussbaum:I can't pick an item to get off the island, correct?
Thaddeus Tondu:It's your answer, but I would say correct. And you can't say volleyball because they already made a movie about that.
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah, so I would pick my wife, my son in an unlimited supply of water.
Thaddeus Tondu:Very interesting answer. So I'm curious as to why.
Ron Nussbaum:It wouldn't be any fun being out in the middle of the ocean without my wife and my son. And you gotta have water. You can't drink the ocean water. Because chances are, if we had an unlimited supply of good water, we'd be able to kill enough stuff to live.
Thaddeus Tondu:That is a very good answer. I don't know if I'd want to subject my wife and my kids to being on that island. They're like, hey, can I send my kids there and I can leave? Only 20 percent of the time. I like that. One of the things that you'd mentioned in terms of builder comms and building that. And I want to kind of unpack some of that, part of things. And you mentioned that you don't understand or didn't, you're trying your best to understand software yourself. And this is why you wanted to build builder comms to a way that is so simplistic that anybody can use it. You reference Facebook. Generally isn't built for the younger generation. It's built for the older generation, maybe in the beginning times it was, but now the way that they do things is built for people that are new to the platform, new to technology, new to be able to do those things. When going through the technological build of BuilderComs, we're looking obviously at some of the other softwares that are out there. What are, what is one thing that you think a software company does incorrectly? You can't use the simplicity part when building, yeah, when building a software.
Ron Nussbaum:They don't say no. Like I literally got good at telling my developer, no, because they just want to build. They like, they get we should do this. We should do that. If we do this and it's just no, just say no. Stick to what it is you want to build and just make it simple because nothing against software development companies or developers or all of that because they're trying to make something great but the way they go about it is by over complicating and making it too big. So it loses its greatness, it loses that magic because no one said no at some point in time. Everybody was like yeah that will make this so much better but for the end user. It doesn't. It makes it more complicated and then it becomes something they can't even use. So I just learned to say no and I think everybody that has a software company, anybody that's listening to this that's in software should go back and re evaluate what have I said yes to that I should have said no to and in the future as you lay out that product roadmap and develop stuff. Say no more to the stuff that spins out of what you're actually trying to build.
Thaddeus Tondu:And I don't think that's just applicable to software companies. That's applicable to every company. Especially when you get something like an EOS system in there where you're dreaming and scheming on things and building out ideas and having those parts of that don't get me wrong, dreaming and scheming plus visionary work is imperative to an organization's survival. But just because it's a good idea. Or just because you think it's a good idea now, it doesn't necessarily mean it is a great idea right now could be something to roadmap later.
Ron Nussbaum:Listen to your customers. Like in business, like we all have our core, if you're an HVAC company, you probably do HVAC. Electrical plumbing like those are your core things like you're not going to spin up something completely crazy You shouldn't it not that you're not going to people do it all the time should it spin up something completely crazy? But that's what ends up happening is people think oh, I can do that And that happens way too often in software because the barrier to entry is a lot less. Like for me, to be able to go spin up a CRM in a scheduling software and a finance software with builder comms, wouldn't it be super hard? But we would suck at everything except for the communication piece. And to me, that's not worth it. Let's just do what we've committed to do and just do it, be the best around at it.
Evan Hoffman:And it does come back to the services. Like I know you mentioned HVAC doing plumbing and electrical as well. You have to get a new license or you need to bring someone in who has the license and now you're relying on them to stay with your company in order to keep it. You're bringing on an entirely new service line where you don't have any system. So now you've got to rebuild out all of that. You got to redo your price book. There's so much that is involved with bringing in a new service line and it's so enticing because when you're changing out that AC, it's I could have added a water heater. That's no big deal, right? stepping out of your area of genius and what it is that you're, The best ad. We had Tommy Mello on Monday, and I know he's been on your show as well, correct? Yeah. Someone who's in garage doors and he said on the show, he's if I add in a new service line, I could add 30 percent revenue to my business instantly just by doing that, but he still hasn't done it yet. Why? Because there's still room for improvement in the vertical he's in. He can still get better at it and he can still produce more results out of it. He hasn't squeezed every last drop out of it yet. So it's jumping into another service line before you're ready. Is I think a huge issue that we see across the trades and it ends up distracting you from what it is that is your primary source.
Ron Nussbaum:Boy, it's just a lot harder than what anybody thinks it is. we went down this road where we, for permitting reasons, we needed a master electrician. We needed a master plumber. And originally we subbed it all out and then it was like, we're big enough. We should try to bring this in house. And I spent two years of my life. Trying to bring this in house in every master electrician, every master plumber, every journeyman. We, it's just a, it was a different machine. And all we were trying to do was try to make something work that were literally two gears that shouldn't be by each other. It just didn't work and how it ended up, the best way we could make it happen was to go out and acquire an electric and plumbing company separately, keep them separate entities, but just feed all work to them under the same umbrella. And that's because they're their own machines. It's just a different word. And I don't think we think about that when we're like, we're going to add a service on. That's what people with the cleaning company, people wanted us to do all the time. We were very strict to what we do. If you get to know me at all, like we just do what we do. And I'm good with saying no. Like we did residential reoccurring cleaning. We didn't do one time cleans. We didn't do Airbnb cleans. We didn't do commercial cleans. We weren't going to come clean up after your birthday party. If you wanted to do business with us, you were going to be a weekly, monthly, bi weekly customer of ours. And if that's not what you were looking for, you know what? There is a ton of cleaning companies that just want to show up and randomly clean your house. I wanted consistency. I wanted predictable revenue and that's the only way to do it.
Evan Hoffman:Love it. Which BuilderComps so want to make sure that we give you the full opportunity to promote that. Talk about that. It's a phenomenal software that allows that full communication from the customer all the way through the journey of moving through a renovation. So why don't you go ahead and talk to us a little bit about builder comms, the solutions that it solves, and then we'll tell people where they can go and check it out.
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah, absolutely. We sponsored the local golf tournament about six months ago. And I'm standing on the hole there and this builder comes up and he's I wish I knew about you 45 minutes ago. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And he's I literally just sat in my truck for an hour and a half going through all my emails, trying to figure out what light socket this customer wanted so I could tell the guy at the job site to put them in. And he's if I had your software, I would have probably known about that in two minutes. Cause he saw it as he pulled up, he looked up our software and he's I would have immediately been able to know. And he said, what would have even been better is that my guy could have just looked and all the information would have been there in one place. And that's what BuilderComs does is it gets. All of this information that's spread all over the place, when you think your emails, employees text messages, all the documents on your desk, the phones full of photos, we get it in one place and we simply organize it per project. So when you click on that project, You know what's being said in all the different messaging channels. You can see what updates are there from the pictures of who's been there and done what has been proposed, what has been signed off on, simply in one place. And where the magic really happens and why I built this software, as I touched on it at the beginning, is that air traffic control. It's that channels of communication, And what that does is when that customer has a scheduling question and they reach out, they're actually talking to the person that's in charge of that schedule. They're not talking to the sales rep. They're not talking to the receptionist. They're talking to the person that can answer their questions. And in construction, the problem is that the customer is never talking to the right person. And our industry standard is, Hey, sorry, I'm not the guy. I got tired of not being the guy. And I built the solution. So that customer never has to hear that ever again. And if they have a sales question, they're talking to the sales person, and then we create a database of all this communication throughout your company. And for anybody that knows what's going on with AI and everything out there, like what we're going to do in 2025 with that information that people are collecting now, and that data that we're going to have for these companies, it's absolutely going to blow people's minds. It's going to blow up. What communication forever looks like. And that's what we're out to do is I'm out. My commitment is to fix communication once and for all in this home service and construction industry. It's too long been the elephant in the room and we're going to do away with that.
Evan Hoffman:I love it. Simplifying communication so that you can provide an exceptional customer experience.
Thaddeus Tondu:Did he buy the product right then and there on the golf course?
Ron Nussbaum:Yeah. Signed up. He signed up right before he even said that. I saw I got on your site and it was like, I literally was fake. I told tell everybody. I said, you should spend the rest of the, I was on like, I was like, you got 16 more hoes to tell everybody what you just told me. Cause that is That's the pain
Thaddeus Tondu:Yep. Oh, it's a pain point for a lot of businesses. It's the, an organization of data and especially when you're dealing with customer focused, customer forward things and. Change orders, this change orders that build this, add this, change this, tweak this, whatever. I went through a kitchen reno. I know what it's like. They probably were tired. They're probably glad that my job was done. But so if you want to find a little bit more about builder comms, you can hit them up buildercoms.com. It is C O M S not two Ms, just one M buildercoms.com of course, put these in the show notes for after facebook.com/ronwesley.nussbaum and then if you want to check out the episode that he did with Evan, I hit it up.
Evan Hoffman:Go look up Construction Champions on YouTube.
Thaddeus Tondu:There you go. There you go. Perfect. Thank you for taking the time Ron, to come on the show with us here today and have a great phenomenal conversation. I'm glad we ended up hitting a hot button in terms of talking about leadership. I know it's always something that I think just gets missed a lot in a lot of everyday conversations. So thank you for talking about that. But before we do wrap up, we have one final question here for you, Ron. Alright, and that is, what is one question that you wish people would ask you more, but don't?
Ron Nussbaum:I would say, why did I start, why did I join the Marine Corps?
Thaddeus Tondu:So why did you join the Marine Corps?
Ron Nussbaum:Was a calling. I had a tattoo on my neck. I spent 13 months getting that tattoo removed. To go to the Marine Corps. Like it literally, I was 22 and I needed to know if I could check that box. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life. And I went to the recruiter and the recruiter said, I'll never be a Marine because of the tattoo. And 13 months later, I stood at Paris Island on the yellow footprints and I blew their minds that I was willing to do that to go. And was what I was meant to do. We wouldn't be having this conversation today if I didn't make that decision.
Thaddeus Tondu:In every decision that we make in the moment, we don't know what the outcome is going to eventually be all we do is the choice in the moment, own that choice in the moment. And so you own that choice and thank you for that. Yeah. Super cool story. And to get a tattoo removed I mean around the neck, I have one lone tattoo on the inside of my foot and it hurt like a bitch and it was it was like, One of the bamboo tattoos. I can only imagine the process of getting it on the neck and then getting it removed because I can't imagine that felt good either.
Ron Nussbaum:I got quite a few tattoos. Getting one removed is the most painful thing I've ever done in my entire life. I can imagine. I can imagine.
Thaddeus Tondu:So thank you for doing that and for taking the time out of your day to sit and chat with us.
Ron Nussbaum:Thank you guys for having me. I enjoyed the conversation.
Thaddeus Tondu:Hey, you're very welcome. And until next time. Cheers. 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.