From Small Jobs To Big Wins: How A Handyman Scales With Profit, People, And Process with Dennis Koval

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it. All right. Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McCray, filling in for Bill Gilliland with your local business training and coaching firm, Action Coach Business Growth Partners.

0:44I'm excited to have Dennis Koval with Fixing Carolina Pro Handyman Services on today as our Epic Entrepreneur's guest. So, Dennis, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and your company and what primary products or services you offer the community. It's a pleasure to be here, Cliff. My name is Dennis Koval with Fixing Carolina Pro Handyman Service. We help homeowners deal with any of those tasks that they may have that they don't know who to turn to. So a lot of contractors do bigger projects. A lot of contractors are specialized in regards to plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and so on.

1:22And we help streamline the process of getting any small tasks done for homeowners. Great, great. Love it. So if you had to start from square one in your business, what would you do differently? If I had to start from square one, what I would do different is keeping track of the numbers. The numbers show if we're making a profit or not. It shows if certain projects that we do are profitable and if we need to adjust. And then keeping up with finances, making sure everything's covered for the month, overhead, profit and whatnot. At the end of the day, we're in business to make a profit. it okay okay great great so what have your biggest learnings been as an owner and employer since you started your business my biggest things that i learned are keeping track of numbers like i stated before and then also once you start hiring on employees their employees become your number one customer if you treat them well they're going to go around and treat other companies well and they're not going to go around your back and treat your company any worse than they were treated.

2:36So treating customers well and then treating your employees well prior to treating your customers well. Okay. And going back to what you said on the first question, you know, if you had to start from square one and kind of look at your finances a little bit better, what would you recommend business owners do? Like, would you recommend them to use some kind of service to track their expenses or finances? Or what would you recommend? Yeah, I would recommend them to use some sort of software or at least like spreadsheets, Google Sheets or Excel on each job. Make sure they track costs of those jobs, what the material costs or whatnot are, and then how much labor hours they put in those jobs and making sure that they receive a certain amount of gross profit.

3:20and then in connection with that if they track their numbers in regards to their overhead so making sure that they don't they're not paying for systems that they're not using because the more systems you have it can be deathbed a million cuts so um at the end of the day if you're paying for a 1999 dollar subscription here and there and you start to accumulate those after or a couple months or years, and you're not watching out for those, at the end of the day, it could just slowly drain your bank account and you just wonder where all your profit went to. So it's just tracking those and tracking your overhead.

4:00Yeah, no, I love it, love it. So what are some common misconceptions about running a business and how do you address them? If you're not keeping up with your money, with your overhead and whatnot, A lot of people think that you're just flowing with money and that you can pay for anything. You can take off, take off of work whenever you want. Although we are flexible with our time, like we could take off for 30 minutes to an hour or take off a couple of days. There's a lot of preparation that we need to do. And if you don't prepare in that way in regards to scheduling and letting homeowners know or customers know that we're off for those couple of days.

4:42or if you don't have employees to fill in whenever we're gone, that can definitely hurt us in the long run. Okay. What have you attributed to your growth so far, company? Satisfaction guarantee is what we focus on. So having cleanliness whenever we go into customers' home, when we leave their home, it looks better than when we got there. they don't notice a difference except for the improvements that we made on their home so focusing on cleanliness quality of work and communicate being communicative with homeowners a lot of people they understand that things can go south things don't go as well as we want them to and a lot of times they're not happy if you keep them in the dark so as long as you communicate with homeowners hey this happened or that happened and this is what we are going to do to resolve it a lot of people are okay with that and they're open and happy that you came that you brought it to their attention and that you're doing whatever you can to resolve it okay now you say you guys have a satisfaction guarantee is that for any anything you guys do for everything that we touch if they're not satisfied we don't accept final payment until they're satisfied and we do whatever we can to make sure they're satisfied okay okay yeah no i like that a lot i like that a lot so basically you know if you're in you know because like you said it's a handyman business so if you're working on somebody's you know back porch or fixing something for them and they don't like the way this looks or whatever you guys will redo it no no charge to them exactly so if we always like to be up front with a lot of things we try to consult with the homeowner on how this is going to look or that's going to look so then we don't put a lot of time and effort into doing this doing this route or that route and that i think helps mitigate a lot of the questions that homeowners have and at the end of the day most times you're satisfied but if there are certain things that need to be corrected because we can explain the whole process all day but visually a lot of homeowners are not able to visualize what something's going to look like so once something is completed then they can see what it looks like and it might not be the way they thought it was going to look like so we're more than happy to make changes um to the to a certain extent i guess you could say as long as it's not like rebuilding the whole house yeah because we did something small but anything that we touched yeah we're definitely going to make the changes that we need to to make sure they're satisfied because homeowners they're living with it for the next 5 10 15 20 years and the way i see it is if it was my personal house i don't want to notice something and then live with that little nuance every single day the rest of however long i live there for so okay so how do you balance your personal life with the demands of running a business?

7:50That is very tricky to balance personal and family life or personal and business life. We just have to set hard guidelines of when we work and when we set our phones down, we have to for sure set our phones down in an area where we are not distracted and just have certain guidelines. okay great great now how does how about vacation and everything like that does that work the same way that works the same way um a lot of times when we go on vacation and it helps to have the right employees to fill in all those holes um so then they can at least hold down the fort while we are gone but there have been times in the past if you're wearing all your all the hats in your business where you would get a call or a text from a customer while you're in the middle of laying on the beach in Florida with family.

8:48It's hard not to respond right away and it's hard not to respond within a certain time frame just to be customer friendly. So it's hard not to do that but then you have to set certain things up and plan ahead of time to make sure customers know that you're around and you can help service them, but you're away for a couple of days. Okay. And what qualities do you look for in employees and how do you foster a positive and productive work environment? The qualities that I look for in employees are open-mindedness for them to be open about learning a new skill, friendly. So then whenever they are working with customers, they're open to speaking with them and they're not closed off because our employees are a representation of who we are as a company.

9:42So, and then cleanliness and attention to detail. Those are the four main things that we look for. Okay. Do you look for any, like, personality traits at all or just those two things? Personality traits, as long as they're open and they're not too introverted, where they're open to having a conversation with homeowners, building rapport. That's the number one thing. A lot of times if you have somebody that's a little bit closed off, it's difficult to have a conversation with them and build rapport with them. So personality-wise, it's just them being open and honest with everybody that they talk with.

10:24Okay, that makes sense. All right, so this is going to be the next one is going to be the quickfire round. So basically I'm just going to say a word and I just kind of want you to tell me the first thing you think of when you hear this word in regards to your business. Education. It's important to always be educating ourselves either on the process, on our product, on our ideal customer, on ways that we can improve with working with our employees or ways we can make the process smoother for homeowners and clients that we work with. Perfect, perfect. what about planning planning is it's hard to plan a lot of times because things are always ever changing a project may take hours longer than we expect it to or days longer than we expect it to or uh customers may change certain things on the project which change which changes and the plan um but we definitely have to plan uh plan for the worst but hope for the best okay now what about inspiration inspiration our my family inspires me to do what i do and making an impact in other people's lives either our employees lives or homeowners lives or lives of people in our community that we don't talk to on a day-to-day basis um and then we're also inspired by other other founders and other companies that work in the same community we do.

12:01Commitment? Commitment. We are committed to our customers to make sure they received, they're satisfied and they received a service like no other. Good. So what words of advice would you offer to other business owners who are looking to grow? words of advice are employees are your number one customers um so you should make sure you treat them fairly uh hire an employee that you would want to be around every single day um customer service is another piece of advice i would have make sure you pay attention to customer service and then education make sure you keep educating yourself and surrounding yourself with like-minded people a lot of times we can be in the weeds working on on our business but it's it's easier and it's difficult because then we there are different points in life that we become like you could say a little bit depressed and we can't assimilate with other people in our life so it's best to surround yourself with other like-minded people okay okay any upcoming events that we personally have no but I am looking forward to starting up something where I can rub shoulders with other other business owners okay and what would you say what's the next big thing for Fixing Carolina I haven't thought that far ahead but Make more of an impact on people in our community, homeowners, customers, and hoping to bring on more employees, more technicians to help us with our day-to-day tasks.

13:58Okay. So you're really looking to grow and expand a little bit? Grow and expand, yep. Okay. Great, great. And lastly, what's the best way for someone to find you or get in touch with you? If they search us up on Google, Fixin Carolina Pro Handymance Service, they can find us on Google. We have over 80 five-star reviews, all from customers that are satisfied with our work. They can call us at 828-707-9086. They can email us at support at fixincarolina.com. Yeah, that's the best ways to reach out to us. Any social media? We have Facebook set up, but we're working through the process of setting up Instagram.

14:39Instagram. I think those are the two big ones that we're setting up, but we're setting up profiles throughout all of social media. So then people can find us anywhere and follow us for anything we may have to offer in the future. Okay. So you say just setting it up. So when do you, when do you expect the Instagram to be, to be ready to go? Before the end of the year. So maybe the next couple of weeks, we're going to do the process actually right now. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being a part of the community and thank you for being on the podcast. We certainly wish you continued success.

15:12Thank you, Cliff. It was a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you very much.

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