Trevor Nix on Growing Multi-Gen Family Garage Business in Portland - EP.283

0:00Your employees are the most important thing. They're more important than the customer. That was a real change of mindset that we had to have is that realizing our employees are more important than the customer. You could have all the customers in the world. And if you don't have employees, well, you just spent money for those customers and completely wasted it. We need to have faith within and we need to have our employees and our teammates have faith within that they're going to be taken care of to properly take care of our customers the way that we want them to be taken care of.

0:28Alex Bridgeman: welcome to the think like an owner podcast this is alice bridgman and rob southern now joining the show this podcast is all about building small businesses and we've been focusing a lot on garage doors for our new business that we're co-owners of durable trades meant to own garage door businesses for a long time we like to learn from owners in the industry you've been in it for decades and sometimes literally in your case trevor grew up in it so we're excited to chat we're here in portland and thanks for hosting us by the way yeah you bet absolutely i'm excited this is my first podcast so yeah we're excited to have you i think we met because my family's garage door broke over christmas and you seem to run one of the better shops in town so i was like you gotta call these guys and you know come to find out you got golden retrievers everywhere as part of the brand so we do we have two corgis excellent we have got three or four generations of golden retrievers within the family yeah that's most excellent well rob do you want to tell us how you got into this and then we can jump into trevor how you got into the business and kind of go from there this is your first podcast as a guest or not as a guest as a co-host yeah as a as a host yeah so you were first to me about being a guest with my executive coach and that was fun and yeah i mean alex and i have known each other for several years through a kind of investor community that we're a part of.

1:51And I sold my business last June, so almost a year and a month ago to the day. And when we reconnected at the end of last year, he had sort of stumbled into this idea of buying and owning crushed art as this is. And I thought, well, that sounds pretty interesting. And I'm going to live the rest of my life from the Pacific Northwest. I want to be in business with a partner with all the same investors. and do something, you know, interacts with the physical world. I'm at blasts. So I was just excited to, yeah, get into business with Alex and also just learn from other business owners. Yeah.

2:31Alex Bridgeman: And to that end, Trevor, thanks for coming on the podcast to share about it. So how did you and your family get into garage doors? Oh boy. Story goes something like grandpa was just looking for a job when he moved down here. He used to work for Boeing up in Seattle. area. And they moved down here and he found a job working for a large company in town called Crawford Door. They were kind of one of the only shows in town. And he was the West Side service guy for Crawford Door. So that's kind of how the garage door industry was born into our family. Is Crawford still around? That Crawford? No, not technically.

3:06There is a Crawford Door that was then kind of bought or absorbed in some fashion by a company now called Interior Tech. I've had some friends work there in and out over the years and they do they do all commercial stuff as well So but Crawford as we used to know it. No, they're they're no longer And at some point he started his own shop.

3:26Alex Bridgeman: When did that happen? Yeah, so that's kind of an interesting story Something happened. I can't remember exactly what it was But his one of his best friends convinced him that he needed to buy a gas station As a business venture to buy a gas station and so he left Crawford door and did that owned the gas station for a handful of years, then decided to end up getting out of that and sold that business. They were actually part of a class action lawsuit against, oh boy, Shell or one of the big dogs. And they won some money in the lawsuit and he took the whole family to Hawaii. And then when he came back, he had some money and said, I'm going to start a garage door business.

4:02And that was basically how it happened.

4:05Alex Bridgeman: So it went to garage doors to gas stations, back to garage doors. Correct. And so what was the first year opening up his own shingle like? It's actually funny you say that. Grandpa's name was on the business license and it's always been, you know, tech started the business. And we've always told the story of my grandpa started the business. But the reality is my grandparent started the business. My grandpa was the owner and he was the one that decided to take the leap and do it. But grandma was always there in the background, was always answering phones and scheduling and running the office side of things, doing the books.

4:36Grandpa was out in the field doing the selling and the service and everything else. And after the first year, we really attribute our entire success to my grandma because after the first year, grandpa, the story goes to grandpa, came back to grandma and said, hey, I think we should just hang it up. And, you know, I'll go back to work at Crawford door. And it really isn't working. And grandma said, let's give it one more year. Let's just give it one more year and see how it goes. And 38 years later, here we are.

5:00Alex Bridgeman: What happened in that one year? It was rough. It was just rough. Getting the phone to ring, trying to figure out how to make money. that was the big thing was getting the phone to ring and actually getting your name out there and establishing yourself and it's scary as an owner you know i mean scary as an owner of an established business let alone an owner that doesn't really have any money and doesn't have a name for himself yet and you're out there trying and trying to drum everything up you can but you know it's an investment it's a long game and it's hard to to gut it out and suck it up sometimes What changed when you started doing that worked?

5:33You know, I don't know the answer to that. I think it was just a combination of the confidence that, well, we're just going to give it one more year anyway and see what happens. And I'm sure the referral started to roll in. And I think the business knowledge of after the first year learning the things that didn't work were able to change pretty quickly and start to establish procedures and things that did work in a more common way. And yeah, I would say a lot of it is just the confidence. you know the fact that grandma said we're going to do it one more year and we're going to make it happen and you know at some point it's bound to work isn't it yeah i wonder if there's like a

6:07Alex Bridgeman: you know work expands to fill the time allowed and if you just give yourself a year to figure it out you're kind of like your your mind just jumps to different ways to make it work so i was going to say was mindset i i would imagine i mean again that was far before i was born but i would imagine a whole lot of it was mindset it was a matter of no we're going to make this work there's a famous football coach his quote was we never lost a game we just ran out of time so you know if you're staying in it long enough you're bound to find success do you know at one point you know he hired his first employee or it really started to you know become something other than his job yeah so actually my dad was technically the first employee well okay i guess my grandma would have been maybe i'm not sure exactly what the logistics of that were but my dad was the first employee and And there was the original plan when the business was started.

6:57My dad was out of college and working at that point. In fact, my dad actually worked for Crawford Door with my grandpa for a very short time until they found out that there was nepotism there and they had a no nepotism policy and fired my dad. So my dad had already kind of been in the garage door game and was working for another company across town. And the plan was eventually that once they got on their feet, he would come into the business as well and kind of help them, you know, run it and grow it and be part of it. So it was always kind of the plan was there for the succession plan between my grandpa and my dad.

7:31And I believe my dad came into the business after he'd had about five years of experience in the industry and was really well established in the industry and in the market. He was an installer. And so he quickly became the installer. My grandpa never really sold doors or installed doors. He was a service guy. He didn't really like installing doors and really having the experience. In fact, In fact, I actually asked him not too long ago, how many doors do you think you've installed in your life? And he kind of pulled it out of his fingers and started counting. So didn't really install many doors.

7:59He serviced, which worked out really well. My dad came in because my dad was an installer. And so they then quickly had a install side and a service side. And each of them handled their own respective side. And it worked really well.

8:12Alex Bridgeman: do you remember any from the way your dad and grandpa has described building the business does it sound like there were any distinct phases of life for the business over time like there was a period where things were challenging but then something changed and there felt like a different phase of life for the business like kind of like the childhood teenage years you know that's the You know, that's actually, that's an interesting question because our business has now renamed itself and rebranded three times. Well, okay, twice, two times have rebranded, but had three names. We originally started as Tiger Door.

8:50I would say then we became all about doors and then we became all about garage doors just about, you know, 18, 19 months ago. So it's kind of interesting too, because each generation, me being the third generation, has now, as we started taking over, has changed the name to the new best thing for whatever the case may be. For instance, this might be one of the answers to your question, is in 2004, my dad became the sole owner, took over the business from my grandfather, and we changed the name from Tigard Door to All About Doors. And at the time, it was all phone book advertising. So we didn't want to be limited to Tigard and have people have to look up Tigard to find us.

9:28Flip pages, exactly. We didn't want to be low on the alphabet. So we thought, okay, what can we start with an A? We don't have anybody with an A name in our family. So I remember sitting down as a kid with my family, my mom and my sister and my dad, and trying to come up with names and ideas. Well, we landed on All About Doors. well fast forward 20 years to 2024 and the number of phone calls that we were getting for people that were looking for doors that we didn't work on because we were a garage doors kind of the entry doors i mean i would get phone calls from from contractors saying hey i need a bid for 600 doors and i'd go whoo absolutely what do you need and he'd go i need a bunch of 306 eights for whatever else blah blah blah and i'd say oh man are you talking man doors and he'd say yeah and and say, does this happen to be a hotel?

10:14Yeah, I got a new hotel going in Portland. And that happened constantly. And it started just burning at my soul knowing how much money we just wasted on that lead paying Google for a call for a service that we don't offer. Were you intended to sell them some Andors? We actually have sold some Andors. Yeah, we've kind of dabbled in a little bit. And it's, my dad did it for a while to try and offer it as a service for that reason. It's just a whole nother set of training. It's a whole nother set of tools. It's a whole nother set of suppliers. It's, it's, it's its own department. There's a lot to it.

10:47So we've kind of played with it over the years and I still contemplated every once in a while because we still get questions about it. But, you know, kind of the next answer to your question, I guess would be, you know, in 2024, knowing how much money we were wasting in marketing, I hopped on the phone with our good buddy, Dan Antonelli over there at Kick Charge Creative. And I remember we had a good 45 minute conversation. And, you know, one of the first things he asked me was, well, what's the name of your business? And I said, well, it's called All About Doors. And he hesitated. And the first thing he said was, you get a lot of calls about front doors.

11:19And I just started laughing. And I said, Dan, that's why I'm calling you. Why I'm here. So that's kind of another, you know, if you're talking phase of life or phase of environment, it would be the advertising environment. In terms of like personal life and phases of personal lives. One big thing, my dad actually used to be a Washington County Sheriff deputy. He did that for a little while, three or four years. and he was doing full-time garage doors during the day. And he was the new guy on the totem pole and was working the graveyard shift for the sheriff's department. And my grandpa basically told him that he felt he was becoming cynical and he didn't like what he was doing to his mental state and his family life.

12:01And my sister and I were both young and he was busy and gone all the time. And my grandpa essentially told him, if you quit, it's your turn to have the business. so to speak. And so my dad thought that was a pretty good plan and took it. So I would say that's kind of another, that was probably one of the biggest turns in our business because my dad was then able to take it from my grandfather, who was very old-fashioned, old school, did everything pen and paper, you know, in 2003 and four, when things were starting to come to technology advancements and the internet. And so my dad, to this day, will talk about how difficult it was to bring the business out of the 1800s is what he says to modern day and getting everything you know out of the file cabinet and onto the documents on the computer when he talks about it just you know how many hours and hours and hours of effort it took to do so so i look at myself as very lucky and and blessed to be able to have the opportunity to take a business that was already up to snuff so to speak with technology and actually kind of leading in technology in our industry in a lot of cases because my dad truly believed in it and tried to be at the forefront of using tech within a blue-collar industry.

13:12I never really thought about it this way, but I think it's interesting. Multi-generation, family-owned businesses almost have this built-in advantage because inevitably someone, a younger generation, is going to want I introduce technology and process and they actually have some credibility with the older generation right whereas if you hire someone new into a non-family-owned business it's like well we've always done it this way and like I put this in and it's the right way but maybe it's a little easier to convince people when you're it's all literally all in the family. Absolutely my dad talks about that all the time and how he he saw the benefits of him coming into the business and the new ideas and the new age stuff that he had grown up with compared to what my grandfather had and explains, or I guess maybe dedicates a lot of our success and growth that we've had in the last handful of years for me coming into the business with, again, new ideas and fresh technology and, you know, more understanding of the current technology than he had and things like that.

14:17So it's interesting you say that because my dad really attributes a lot of the business growth over the years to that very thing of you got to have young, fresh ideas and fresh minds in place to keep you in line with the market and where everybody else is. Have there been any, you know, controversial, you know, decisions or changes that either worked out or didn't? That's an interesting question. There's got to be something. There's always something,

14:42Alex Bridgeman: you know, it's, it's, we're family. We are all fighting for the same thing and everybody tries to get there a different way. And sometimes it causes headbutting. A lot of times people will ask me, how do you work with your dad? And I was joking. They say, it's easy. He stays out of my way and I run the business. But I mean, the reality is anytime a big decision comes up, I mean, I'm co-owner with my father, right? And so my title is technically managing partner. So any big decision that comes up, I don't just make it. I always call him and we talk about it. And he 100 % of the time ends the conversation with, it's your decision.

15:16Because I am the managing partner and he trusts me. You know, he gives me the leash that he feels necessary to get us to where we need to be. But there's always that conversation and my reliance on his past and his experiences to know what might work or what didn't used to work or what the case may be. Can I think of anything specifically? I will tell you that rebranding with KickCharge Creative and the massive undertaking and expense that that was going to hit our business with was I don't want to call it a point of contention, but it was definitely a long decision-making process for sure. I mean, it was majorly expensive.

15:56Not just the kick charge portion. I mean, it's rebranding the trucks and it's printing all new everything. It's redoing your website. It's all the stationary. It's everything.

16:06Alex Bridgeman: You know, and then getting everybody used to it and starting fresh. I mean, down to your greeting message on the phone. How do you answer the phone now? That's different. You know, we've done it this way for 20 years. and we do it a hundred times a day the same way. Well, today you don't. That's hard for your CSRs to swallow. I wish we would have done it 20 years ago. You know, there's a thing that people say, I think I've even heard Dan say it on podcasts before, of, man, how could you afford to do that? Well, after you do it, it turns to, how could you afford not to? And, you know, that's a quote from somebody I'm stealing, but it's true.

16:41It really does hold true. And, you know, it was interesting timing for us because we did it towards the end of COVID. where we had some pretty explosive growth through COVID. I mean, our company essentially tripled within three years. And it was interesting timing because it was like, man, we're going gangbusters. And if we just have a truly recognizable brand, we can really lean into that and explode even more. And then the market just took a big dip. And so it was interesting timing and I guess nothing's ever perfect. But even then, regardless, I wish we'd have done it sooner and I don't know how we went so long without it.

17:17That makes me think of this, I don't know, example of similarly investing in employees. I think an employee comes to a CEO and says, hey, I want to take this course and will the company pay for it? And he's like, yeah, let's do it. When the CFO says, well, wait, what if we mess on this person and then they leave? And the CEO says, well, what if we don't? Then they stay. Yep. That's the same idea. Yeah, absolutely. I love that quote too. That's another thing that we've really, really leaned into was trying to invest within the company, you know, and offer bigger benefits and be more competitive with our offerings to, again, this younger generation that in a lot of cases, it's not all about the money.

18:01you know they want to be comfortable they want to have a stocked refrigerator they want to have good benefits they want to have the creature comforts that a traditional old style blue collar industry company didn't have it was about the money you know and so it's been an interesting process in learning how important investing in your people really is for the success and growth of the business that's been another huge i don't know i guess you'd call it business change or life change within the business big realization maybe i remember when i sold my business inevitably after the fact you know some folks ended up leaving and they would send messages to kind of our company channel within the larger company chat and the most rewarding part of the whole experience was when people would talk about this being the best job they ever had right because of the people and because of things that you're able to do for them and really just like the employee experience it's amazing yeah yep and that's that's big on my radar to continue to push and grow that's i really want to continue that track that we've been on you know i want to i always tell my people like i want you all to make more money because that means the business is making more money and when the business is making more money we can do cool things tell them all the time i want to do cool things.

19:23I want to have a big building. I want to have a place people want to be. I want to have a cool lunchroom with a stock refrigerator that people like to come back and take their breaks at. I want to be the place that people don't mind coming in and hanging out on a Saturday because it's kind of fun. You know, that's, that's kind of my, my dream lofty goal that I'm pushing towards.

19:41Alex Bridgeman: What are like the, the big kind of rocks and goals for this year, or maybe like expanding to like the past two years or three years, whatever. The rebrand was big, but is there's something else you're excited to work on or see through? Yeah, it's interesting you ask that. I wouldn't say, I mean, this is bad of me to say, but I wouldn't say we have necessarily like a big goal. I mean, obviously everybody's got a revenue goal, but I wouldn't say there's as much of a big goal, a nearsighted goal. It's been more, this year I've been focusing on making things more efficient rather than implementing.

20:15The last couple of years with the new brand, And it's been a lot of implementation. We've brought on some new technology. We use a, oh geez, I'm drawing a blank. It's a FSM. It's a field service manager. It's called Workies. Yep. It's like CRM, customer relationship manager, whatever you want to refer to it as. Technically, this one, I guess it's an FSM because it's a field service manager. We can do stuff by dispatching companies or dispatching people. So that's been a big one with implementing that and implementing all the new technology that they bring within, all the integrations they have within and getting our implementing new policies and procedures on how we run jobs and how we record things and how we take pictures and what videos and whatever else things we use internally.

20:58But it's been a big outpouring of money. I think maybe one of my lessons I've learned within the last few years is at least the way I picture it to maybe kind of have a balance of implementation and efficiency and finding ways that when you implement things, great perfected and then how can you make it more efficient within rather than just implement implement implement implement and expect results back immediately because i've realized well that's a big outpour of expense and if you're implementing all these things not refining them properly you're now spending more money and it takes a lot longer to try and catch up and get that to be more efficient on the back end so this this year was a big focus on making things more efficient and trying to trim the fat so to speak does that include kind of like adoption of near software or processes or whatever as you're rolling out but if it's only getting used you know to five percent of its capabilities or ten percent of the time like it wasn't worth it absolutely yeah we talk about that all the time you know we have for instance like one big one that people talk about a lot is credit card processing fees you know i know that within workies we pay a pretty hefty processing fee.

22:09And it is painful to look at at the end of every month or especially the end of every year and realize how much money you paid in processing fees. But I know we could go shop them elsewhere. The problem is, or I guess not problem, but the battle is it's so efficient to be able to use it within the system that you're using. It's all under one interface. It just boom, boom, boom is backwards compatible in two way syncs with QuickBooks. It's just, it's instant pulls right up. The guys already have it open on their phone. They don't have to open another application or go to another website. Don't have to then backwards sync it to Workies to have it sync to QuickBooks.

22:43It's just immediate. It almost becomes like a customer service benefit and employee retention benefit. Absolutely. Employee retention. I'm glad you mentioned that because that has been a eye-opening thing for me to see how much of a difference that has made with the employees that we have now and how they talk about the way that we use our technology or our CRMs and things like that and how it's differed from their past experiences and been better in some ways or worse in some ways. But the way that it's, we try to make it easy to use is good for them. It's good for their morale. It's again, it's another one of those comforts that people want.

23:20Yeah.

23:20Alex Bridgeman: Imagine calling the office after at the end of every job four to six times a day to enter someone's credit card. I have a couple of teammates that talk about that all the time. They couldn't work up prices and estimates. They couldn't do any of that stuff on site. Is there, at this point, is there anything to be done by attack after they drive away or is it all like kind of tank tariff? Perfect scenario. They show up, they handle it all. It's done. The only thing to be done after it is completed, after they're done, is for our bookkeeping to go in and balance the books. That's it. How do you train that customer?

23:59Alex Bridgeman: That seems like such an important, obviously it's a really important piece, is training the customer interaction from the moment they drive up to when they leave and making sure that that process has some consistency across multiple techs, each doing three to six jobs a day. Seems like a huge challenge. How do you address or go through all the different pieces of that process with any one customer. How do you help that? It's very difficult. There's really, I tell our guys all the time, there's no black and white, right? We try and speak in black and whites because it's easier to get somebody to understand a process when you're speaking in black and whites.

24:43But there's no such thing as black and white in our business. Every customer is different. Every garage door is different. Every driveway is different. It's constantly changing. And so learning how to read the gray and how to understand the gray and speak for yourself and tweak things to make it work better for you is really the only way that we've found success in doing it. We've actually been criticized in the past for overtraining our employees, which is very interesting to me and really hurts for me to hear people in our industry say that because of the amount of time that we believe it truly takes to have a technician trained that we're comfortable with putting in front of our customers and taking care of them how we want them to be taken care of.

25:22I know in the past and in my personal experiences and stories I've heard, some pretty scary things happen. They just send guys out there and make it happen and expect the best. You know, we like to have guys ride with multiple technicians that are trained already and are successful and do things the way we want them to be done. That seems to work really well. And what I tell everybody is you're going to take parts of what everybody does and mold them into what works for yourself. And I think that that's the reality. I've had a big, I guess, aha moment in the last few years of realizing that there are a thousand ways to do things.

26:01and it doesn't have to be done in one way. And one term that I kind of use, I kind of joke about is we always call them the ABCs, right? And I could put the ABC steps in front of you from step A through step Z on how you install a garage door. And ideally, it'd be awesome if we all did them exactly the same way, A through Z, but it's not realistic because again, every garage is different. Every customer is different. Every door is different. And every technician ultimately is different. So what works for me to go from step B to C might just not make sense to you. And instead you like to go from B to D and then go back to C.

26:35And if that works for you, that's fine. And what I joke about is I say, look, as long as your Z looks like mine and gets there relatively in about the same amount of time, I'm happy. As long as the customer's happy, we're good. So learning how to let go and how to let people think for themselves, I think has been majorly successful for us. I tell all the guys that I want them to feel like they kind of have their own little slice of the pie or their own little business within our business because I want them to care like that. So that has been, I think, received well. I've heard a couple of the guys come back and tell me that they really utilize that mentality when they're with clients.

27:12It's been great. It's also been interesting because every technician that I have right now has had previous experience at other door companies. And until this group that I have right now, I had never had a technician that had previous experience. so it's been really interesting because i've always been able to mold people in the way that we want them at least relatively close again they make it themselves but but at least close and now i have you know five or six different guys that all do it five or six different ways and it's been hard for me to accept that but they're all great and they all get raving reviews and their craftsmanship is excellent so i really i've realized that you just can't you can't always have it the exact way you want it, but it's okay.

27:58It'll work its way out. What does someone who's been doing this for five or 10 years know that someone who's only been doing it for one doesn't? Oh boy. That is a tough question. I think, I guess maybe the soft, the weak answer would just be experience. Like I said, every garage door is different. Every garage is different. Every customer is different. But the more of them that you deal with, more of any topic, pick a topic, any that you deal with, the more experience you have on how to handle those situations. So again, if I were to give you the steps, you know, A through Z on how to install a garage door, sometimes garage doors don't need step, you know, Y and Z because they're already done or this door specifically doesn't come with those parts or whatever the case may be.

28:45So a lot of times I would say that what a technician knows with a bunch of experience compared to a technician that doesn't have as much experience is simply how to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that they may run into where somebody with less experience and i'm speaking from experience because i ran into this many times when i was new you hit a wall and you don't know where to go so there's a lot of what i call aha moments that people have in the garage door industry and everything but especially in the garage door industry for me from speaking from my experience, learning how to back hang a door properly and how things need to be, you know, square level and plum, you have these moments that you just go, Oh, I get it.

29:29I will never forget the first extension spring I ever installed. I was over in Northeast Portland and I had never done one before. And I was given this door. This is why I worked for another company first. I was given the store to go install and they said, Oh, it's easy. You'll figure it out. Okay, cool. I'll go figure it out. And, and I, you know, being a confident young man, I was like, cool, I'll figure it out. No problem. I get out there and I get the door and everything installed and I go to put the springs up. And I, for the life of me, I just, I was lost. I had no idea what to do. So I called my dad.

29:57Right. And I did that a lot as I was working at the other company and they knew he had, obviously they knew who he was and whatnot. It was actually one of my dad's good friends. And I called him up and I said, okay, I'm dealing with an extension spring and I've got this here and that there. And what do I do? And he starts laughing and he's laughing at me. He's going, really you get really you can't figure this out and i remember getting so upset because i was like dude just tell me what where does the cable go how do i hook it you know what do i do and speaking of aha moments i will never forget when he goes run this through here run this back over here and hook this there and i just hooked the hook the s hook to the front of the track and i just sat there on the phone with him and went really that's it but it was an aha moment you know, and it instilled a lot of confidence in me of, I can figure this out.

30:45And if I would have just taken a break and not been so mad that I couldn't figure it out, taking a deep breath, I probably would have figured it out. But that's, that's, I guess, an answer to your question of what do technicians that have experience know the technicians don't have as much experience not know. It's, it's just a way to figure it out, you know, a way to, a way to overcome. My dad's always said, when you learn to become an installer, you learn how to install things. So I'll have people ask me all the time oh i gotta you know my grandfather asked me hey i gotta install this air conditioner and you know whatever mini split or whatever here do you think you can help me absolutely i'll figure it out no problem i'm getting a water filter installed here in a couple weeks so there

31:24Alex Bridgeman: you go we'll figure that out too perfect get after it there's a figure it out in this yeah to experience tech so hold on you worked for a company that was not your family business first. Correct. So my story into the industry is a little bit interesting. I graduated college with an environmental studies degree thinking, cool, I live in Portland, that'll be marketable. There's a million jobs out there that have that. And the environmental stuff was becoming a big deal. I had a cool internship with an oil company and my job was to, well, I did a lot of different things, but the big environmental issue they were having at that time was they were having to learn how to deal with all the natural gas that was being emitted from the oil wells and what do we do with the gas because just flaring it and burning it and sending it into the atmosphere is not a good thing right so i had a cool cool environmental studies job so when i graduated actually back up when i came home from school my senior year in college with my internship the price of oil was at 88 a barrel when i went back from winter break three weeks later the price of oil had dropped to$44 a barrel.

32:33And when I walked into the office on Monday, my boss called me into his office and said, Hey, we got to pull your job offer. It's not there anymore. Money's not there. We don't have it. So I immediately went to my advisor at school and said, Hey, my, this is what just happened. My dad owns a graduate company back home. And the chances are pretty good that eventually I'll end up working there. Can I take some business classes? She said, absolutely. So she got me all signed up. Everything was all good. But when I graduated, boy, I still tried. I tried to stay out of it. I applied for, I don't even, I can't even count how many jobs I applied for.

33:05And I was working sheet metal roofing and siding in college for a local company here that I know the owners of the grapevine, also a family, multi-generational family company. And I knew I didn't want to do that long-term because that was just beating me up. Maybe I'm soft, but that was beating me up pretty good. And so I remember calling my dad at the end of that summer after I graduated and said, okay, uncle, I quit crying uncle. And I said, I'm ready for a job. And he goes, Oh, that sucks. I just hired somebody. I don't have any spots open for you. And I said, Oh, okay. And he goes, but call Rob is a good friend, Rob own a company across town.

33:42So I called Rob and we made an agreement and I started working indoors. And so there was kind of this loose understanding that after a while he would have an open, my dad would have an opening for me and I would, would end up coming to work in the business with him and so about a year right about a year later my dad was hiring again and called me up said okay if you're ready to come on come on so i did i keep going back to your comment that like every garage door is different i wouldn't think so as you know a newcomer in the industry what would surprise like the average homeowner about you know how their door their garage whenever their situation may be different from their neighbors or somewhere across town or in a different part of the country.

34:28Sure. Interesting question. How to answer that strategically is tough. I mean, without getting into the nuances and the simplicities of a garage door on things that could be different, right? I compare everything to a car. Everybody understands cars. You have a Ford F-150 and I have a Chevy 1500. Are they really that different? Well, in the grand scheme of a vehicle, of a half ton truck, no. But yeah, just about every single nut and bolt on that truck is different from one another. So without getting into that type of thing, I would say what are the biggest differences that might surprise somebody?

35:08I think something that might really surprise somebody who knows nothing about garage doors is how much kinetic energy is stored within the springs on the garage door and the actual lifting or counterbalance mechanism of one garage door to another garage door can be vastly different so there are multiple kinds of garage doors and the way that they operate whether they are we call them shin kickers or a one-piece garage door that tilts up like some people call them tilt up doors whether they're sectional garage doors whether they have extension springs going back to extension springs or torsion springs there are other manufacturers that make kind of a safety style spring one was called a torque master so it has the same thing as a torsion spring but it's all internal has different parts so there's just a lot of nuances about garage doors that could be vastly different from one another to where i couldn't confidently take a technician out that i've trained on how to install one type of spring and just send them to somebody's house without somebody else going there because there's a very good chance to be a different type of spring so i don't know if that totally answers your question but no it does and Well, so, I mean, you said earlier that you send your new techs out with multiple techs.

36:16And, like, inevitably they're going to get exposure to, you know, something that, you know, this guy has experience with that that guy didn't. And so you're kind of cross-pollinating that way. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah, with garage doors and clients. We do a lot of, well, a lot is relative. We try to do some disk training, disk assessment training and stuff with personality training, testing and stuff with our technicians when they start to help them understand how to deal with clients. Because we all know, and anybody that's been in any kind of customer service knows that they are both the best and worst part of the job.

36:53you know and i tell everybody you have a hundred clients that are just awesome and you truly enjoyed them and you could go have dinner with them and they invite you into their house half the time i've had i've had clients come out with a sandwich in the middle of an install and say hey sit down have a sandwich with me i made you lunch i mean it's just awesome and then you have one bad client that you just can't please and it makes you go why do we do this why am i here you know one I'll steal this quote and I'll credit it to my wife. I think she heard something along the lines of this from somebody else.

37:26But what she likes to say is you could be the juiciest, sweetest, ripest peach in the world. And some people don't like peaches. So I think dealing with clients is frankly, probably every bit as hard or important as learning how to work on a garage door. Let's take that back. For the way that we run our business, because we do everything is very personal. and personalized. So again, you know, one thing that I may quote for you, Rob might be, you might have the same garage door as Alex. And I might give you a quote for X number of dollars because of the conversation that I had with you and the relationship that you and I built compared to the relationship and conversation that I had with Alex might be different because I found out that you use your garage door seven times a day and you've got four kids and that's where they come in from school.

38:13And I'm like, Oh my goodness, here's what I recommend for you. And Alex goes, well, mine's a wood shop. I open it once a month. Well, you're spring broken, your spring broke, but you would have a highly different recommendation coming from me than Alex would for that very reason. So, there's just a lot of nuances on I guess all facets of the business and being a technician. If you're trying to fill a tech position and you've got two applicants and one is you know, great with customers and the other really knows garage doors and you've got to pick one and you're going to have to train them on the gag.

38:52Do you have a preference? Easy. And it would be the person that can deal with customers. Absolutely. There's a lot of people call it the beer test, right? Or the dinner test. If I'm interviewing somebody, would I go to dinner with this person? Would I go have a beer with this person? And that is huge for me. Heck, the last four or five people that I've hired, that I've interviewed, I've had two hour interviews with because we just find ourselves sitting in my office, you know, shooting the breeze and having a good time. And to me, that's a very good sign. You know, I've had interviews with people where they walk in and I'm like, as the interviewer going, wow, how can I make this as short as possible?

39:23And it's unfortunate, but it's true. It's just something, whatever the case may be, is not jiving. So to me, I can teach you how to do garage doors. That's no problem at all. That's my bread and butter. I can't teach you how to be a people person. You can't train personality. A person has the personality. You can teach them and give them tricks and try to help alter things to maybe make things easier for them. but I as in my opinion I don't believe you can truly train personality that's something that's inherent within yeah you can develop in the right direction they've got the DNA right but if their DNA is kind of different they can't exactly yeah yep and and maybe they're great with clients but they didn't mesh well with me or they walk in the front door and I saw the way that they talked to our office people and then they then they it changed when he turned and shook my hand or something we noticed those things you know as people that are going to be managers to be in charge of people that are dealing with people who by the way write your paycheck you know one thing i always say is customers are not always right but they do always write your paycheck so if i can't mesh with somebody in a way that i know that i talk and converse with my clients how's that going to work when i'm expecting them to converse with my clients so that's a tough one easy answer though is is definitely i would take the person that is the personable upbeat ready to go easy to converse with human over the person that is the best technician in the world but doesn't mesh well with people for our business model and thinking about training

41:03Alex Bridgeman: techs on customer service. And, you know, there's going to be customers who are difficult and you have to figure out how to do that. But have you found any common threads for why customers would be difficult with a tech, either from just not understanding a quote or what you mean? And is there some way to kind of preempt or prevent a lot of common misunderstandings? And maybe what are some of those that you try to train? That's also a great question. to nail it down to specifics i would say no i haven't really we haven't really had anything that was seems to be a common problem that really sticks out like a sore thumb there's always something somebody didn't understand a quote somebody didn't you know somebody misinterpreted what the technician said maybe one is well the office said this and now the technician's standing there in front of them saying this one thing i always tell my team is you have to trust your teammates and you always have to trust your teammates first because unfortunately a common term is people hear what they want to hear and when you're speaking to somebody in person it's way different than the feelings that you have and the confidence that you may have when speaking to somebody over the phone and so you know i hear it a lot where one of my guys will call me and say hey so-and-so customer just told me that so-and-so teammate or our other technician said this and i like the kind of chuckle and I go, okay, do you really think that our teammates said that?

42:29Does that really sound like something our team would say? So that's one big thing. The other thing would be technology, again, using technology and using your CRMs or your FSMs properly, being able to highlight and make it very obvious with various line items and prices and the way that that Workies in particular works or, you know, companies like Service Titan or Jobber or house call pro they do a really good job at making it cut and dry and making the process pretty simple to repeat and things like getting signatures trying to make things really clear but that's probably the biggest thing is the miscommunications that happen between the phone the initial csr conversation with the customer and then our technicians and the customer probably tends to be the the biggest hiccup that happens and like what what actually what actually happens is that you know they go out thinking they're going to do one type of job and so their their truck is you know stocked with that kind of equipment and and parts and it's actually a different job or i would tell you more often than not it ends up being price price is a really tough one and boy we could do an entire podcast just on price and learning how to deal with price with customers and this isn't something you guys are unfamiliar with obviously but you know we do our best on the phone to avoid giving prices.

43:49And that's not to be dodgy. But the reality is, you know, one thing I always say, again, going back to cars is when you call me and say, hey, my garage door is doing this and making this sound and it won't open. How much does that cost? It's the same thing as you just called the auto technician and said, hey, my car is making this noise and it sounds like bang, bang, clunk, clunk. What's wrong with it? And how much does that cost? I have no idea. I got to take a look, right? So we try to avoid giving prices. is, let me phrase it differently. We try to avoid diagnosing over the phone, right? Because a diagnosis will give you the price.

44:23We will be able to, once we diagnose it, tell you what's wrong, how to fix it, and here are your options, right? So that is a really common issue that happens where the person doesn't want to book the call, the customer doesn't want to book the call at the CSR because we're not giving them a price because we don't know what the price is going to be. And the classic thing is, well, it could cost, put it this way, it could cost, $500 or it could cost$1 ,000. Well, what did the customer just hear? It's going to cost$500. So when we show up and go, okay, here it is, it's actually going to cost you$850.

44:54No, no, the office said$500. Well, now you got to fight on your hands, right? Or you're just going to lose the client because now they're not happy. And now nobody wins. So one thing we try to do is we try to create the win triangle. We try to create a situation where at the end of the experience, the customer wins, the company wins, and the technician wins, and everybody's happy. right? Whatever that may look like, whether that's a big sale on the technician one and the company one and the customer is just elated because their door works better than new, or whether that be something very simple that we decided was going to be a warranty because we're going to stand behind our work and the technician gets a great review, the customer's happy as heck, and the company's happy because we have a return customer down the road when their door breaks.

45:35So whatever the case may be. So I would tell you to answer your question, the biggest issue that we would have between communication between the office and the client and the technician, the three-way communication would be when they demand a price in order to get them on the schedule and not fully understanding what that's going to look like. And as the business owner, I always try to step back and go, what can I do differently? But one thing that I can do differently is I can continue to work with our CSRs to train them on how to portray what each cost that they may give, if they unfortunately have to is actually going to cover but that's hard to do you've been in business a long time i imagine you're playing around with like different compensation schemes for techs are there any like trying true lessons there like do it this way don't do it that way yeah that's a good question as well so one thing that our company doesn't do and this is not to bag on any company that does.

46:36I believe it's a great way to pay. I believe it's a great way to incentivize and a way to produce more profit for your company and even for your technician is we don't pay a commission. And I know commission can be paid in many ways. We implemented a program. I kind of came up with this program here, I guess I would say about four years ago, maybe five, six years ago, where I was trying to determine how can I incentivize or technicians to continue to sell things, not just for the sake of selling them, but to offer options to the client that might want them. How can I incentivize them to do so that will help increase our average ticket, make the customers more happy and make the technicians more money, creating the wind triangle.

47:20And without paying commission being a flat rate, or I guess a percentage of profit or a percentage of whatever the part costs or whatever the case may be for the commission. I came up with the program that we call the incentive program that is a way for me to incentivize our technicians to continue to sell things and increase their average tickets and make more money themselves and more money for the company, but still kind of control the way that they do it in the fashion that they do it. And what I mean by that is instead of doing a flat percentage off of whatever the total number that they sell may be, or off of what the profit from the product that they sell is or however somebody may work their commission base.

48:04We, I chose a handful of products or items that we can sell for a garage door that I know are 10 out of 10 times a good repair or a repair for the long term or whatever the case may be that have a good margin that the customer will be happy on that. I know that we stock. So again, a way to create that wind triangle again, through both the profits and the cost as well as the performance of the door and the happiness of the customer in the future. So things like preventative items, you know, if I show up to your house and you say, oh, my garage door opener doesn't work. And I can look at your springs and go, well, they're caked in an inch thick of rust.

48:45Maybe we should replace those as well to make sure that the new garage door opener I install is going to actually last. Well, that was preventative. They didn't call you about the spring, but now you sold a spring, right? And I have that set price of what that spring costs. So they can't just look at you, Rob, and go, oh, you have lots of money living in this big old house. I'm going to charge you more because now I can make more money on my 20 % commission or pick a number. So to answer your question in terms of things that we've done and pay over time, we've had people be on salary that really bid us in the rear.

49:20We've had people be on salary that have been fantastic. we believe that people deserve to be paid and to have the right people that you want in place and to get them to stay they need to be paid so we tend to pay a higher base hourly wage as well as commissions and whatever or incentives and stuff on top of them and offer bigger benefits and things like that rather than paying a lower base rate wage or salary whatever with a higher percentage commission if that makes sense if that answers your question so have we found the the key and

49:55Alex Bridgeman: the secret sauce no everybody's big rant and rave right now is performance pay as i'm sure you guys know and i've heard of and this is a it's a mild version of performance pay is kind of it's basically what it is without being a percentage and without tracking every single item they sell we track the the important ones or the common ones that we know are going to be good repairs sure and so you know anytime one of your techs sells one of those products that your customer is going to be happy with it and it makes them you know appropriate margin for your business absolutely yep makes sense I would imagine as an employee you know obviously having a wage is like certainty of income the alternative though for you all is that now you really have to keep that person visiting like if someone is a slow week and they're paying a commission the business isn't paying them to sit around but the employee doesn't at work so maybe they're going to go where they can find it right so it's kind of a balance and you're striking absolutely yeah kind of back to earlier what i was saying how important it is to make your employees happy and how you know your employees are the most important thing that they're more important than the customer and a lot of people that's a that was a real change of mindset that we had to have is that realizing our employees are more important than the customer.

51:12And everybody gets that, can have multiple opinions and whatever they want to think on that because, well, with no customers, you have employees for no reason. But you could have all the customers in the world. And if you don't have employees, well, you just spent money for those customers and completely wasted it, right? So we look at it the other way and go, okay, well, our team is by far the most important part. And that's not to say our customers are not, but we need to have faith within and we need to have our employees and our teammates have faith within that they're going to be taken care of to properly take care of our customers the way that we want them to be taken care of so it's we've kind of shifted our mentality to really understand what people these days in the workforce want and how we can better their quality of life and quality of work life to then get the performance out of them that the business needs to survive so it's been it's been monumental in the last handful of years for our business.

52:11Alex Bridgeman: What spurred that change in structure? Like, what was it look, what did it look like before like how tech got paid and what prompted the shift? Well, what it looked like before was guys made hourly wages, you know, and they, they wanted more money. They work more. And, you know, we were a lot smaller back then when it was kind of like that. And the reality was we had the work to work overtime all the time. In fact, I still have a guy with me now who's been with us a long time. And he talks about, you know, he used to work 68 hours a week. And if he wanted to make more money to pay his mortgage down a little more this month, he just took on more jobs, worked more, and he made a lot of money and it was good.

52:49But the new age workforce doesn't want to do that. You know, I joke about the work till 5 p.m. The whole mindset of working till 5 p.m. or the art of working till 5 p.m. is no more. It's not a thing anymore. People don't want to do that. People want to go home. Time's more important. And I would tell you, pretty much every one of my employees would tell you or tell me right to my face that time and their families are more important to them than working, which is great. That's how it should be. And that's what we believe. Again, we're a family business. I say to somebody every single day within our company, that family comes first.

53:25Alex Bridgeman: Just yesterday, my grandma took a spill yesterday and I had to leave in the middle of the day and go take my grandma to the urgent care and get her broken foot all taken care of. Literally yesterday. and you know i good is it fine now yeah she's she's all good she's taken care of she's got referred to especially where she broke her foot and sprained her wrist and a couple things she's okay thank you for asking but you know i had stuff on my day that i was going to go do and i reached out in fact one of our guys our salesman scott called me when i was sitting in the room with her and i had to forward his call and text him back say hey grandma took a spill i'm still planning on coming out there i'm just going to be late sorry and he emailed me or text messaged me back and said, take care of grandma family first, because it's a culture that we've tried to build within because it's the truth.

54:07But that being said, there's a level of, well, when the fire's hot, you got to get on it. When the getting's good, you got to get it. And if you want to make money, you got to work. So walking that line and having that balance is important these days. And understanding that as an owner and a manager of people is, I think, incredibly important to your success and what it's going to look like in the future of keeping employees long-term, or do you need to hire more employees, or do you have too many employees, or whatever the case may be. And a lot of times that can be market dependent. We oftentimes in our industry rely on the summer months to be our crazy months.

54:46Everybody's using their garage door more, they're outside more, it goes up and down, they're getting a lawnmower in and out. So we're often busier in the summer. Well, we kind of joke that, hey man, when it's time to work, work is when you make your money but that's not really how today's employee wants to work anymore so balancing a way of like kind of like you were alluding to rob of continuing to keep that phone ringing and get that work coming in constantly to have the ability for them to work their hours is hard that's that's a constant balance for me what about the like nights and weekends emergencies or just like managing responsiveness too?

55:27Do you have certain kind of like employees that opt into that call or are you taking those calls or? Yeah, it's a great question as well. We also incentivize them for various things. So we take emergency calls. Frankly, we do it pretty rarely. We're a small family business and I try to tell everybody like, look, I don't want to work nights and weekends if I don't have to. I do and I do it all the time. That's just the nature of being a business owner, but I don't want to have to make them do it if they don't want to do it either. So if they're going to do it, we, for instance, if they take an emergency call and we charge emergency fees, we give them an extra$100 for that call, plus their regular wages, plus whatever incentives they make when they sell it.

56:05And again, that's a way to create the wind triangle. The customer's happy we could be there. They're happy because they made extra money and the company made money because they went. So it's kind of the same idea. For the weekends, we don't do Sundays. We are now on a revolving Saturday schedule where we have one technician kind of on call and ready for Saturdays when things come up. and we have during the week, we have a revolving schedule for late nights. There's one technician who is just kind of ready and on call for a job that may come in later. The reality is we don't do the 24-hour emergency service.

56:37We should. We have an answering service that answers the phone and takes care of those things, and I always get notifications where I can help manage that if something were to come up, or I could go do it myself, which I have. I've been sitting at home watching TV at 10 p.m., and I see a note or whatever come through from a customer that I know is, you know, our little old lady in whatever retirement community and I'll call her up and go jump in the truck and take care of it because I recognize it. But as for an official schedule and repeatable service for that type of thing, we have not implemented that yet because we're small enough now that I don't think we have to.

57:10I think one of our avenues for growth is to do that, is to have a full-time weekend crew and go seven days a week. I have a question. There are a lot of garage door companies companies even within you know tygard or furled or wherever why do you think the market like supports so many do they come and go right there's so many awesome individuals right who it's like jack's garage door and it's one guy in a truck and like why is the market like that especially jack's over a door actually is one of the companies in town they were the longest companies in town my grandpa and jack used to work together at crawford door you know that's interesting because Portland is a tough market and there are companies that have come in here, very, very large, successful companies that have come into Portland and left because their resources could have been used better elsewhere.

58:01And they just weren't finding success in the Portland market specifically for garage doors that they have in other markets. It's not a licensed trade, which I think is a huge, huge problem. And it's terribly unfortunate. And I really wish there was a way we could push it to become a licensed trade. Yes, you have to have a business, you have to have insurance, you have to have a bond, you have to have a business license to be in the garage door industry, but you don't have to be certified in garage doors and be licensed to work on a garage door. I think it's a huge missed opportunity for our industry, unfortunately.

58:33That being said, there are a lot of suppliers as well that will just sell to anybody, which is really unfortunate, especially with the dangers that do come with the garage door industry. And again, that loaded spring and garage doors that can weigh hundreds and hundreds or thousands of pounds. And, you know, there's one spring that's, or two springs or 10 springs that are storing all the energy to counterweight or counterbalance that door. So I think that having manufacturers that will sell to anybody or suppliers that will sell to anybody. And the fact that it's an unlicensed trade makes it a really easy way to just buy a truck and have a few parts on your truck and just put a phone or an ad in the phone book or, you know, put a picture on a park bench and have somebody call you and go do it.

59:15I think that also because of the fact that it's unlicensed, it allows people to really undercut pricing on a lot of different things and becomes a price war, which that's not uncommon. That's not just solely our industry, of course. But I think that there's a lot of combinations and things that happen in the garage door industry and in our market specifically that allow people to just start up a garage door company and start running calls. to your question of do they work their way out? Yeah. When I was younger and first getting into the business, I used to get all hot and bothered about all the new companies and the customer would call me and go, oh, this guy told me he could do it for this much.

59:56And I'd tell the customer, I've never even heard of them. And our family's been in the industry for 35 years. How do you know? What do you mean? Who is that? Now, as I get older and I've been in it long enough, I've seen it. And, you know, I don't fault anybody for it. Look at us. That's how we started. You know, I think it's great. so I think that the good ones will find their way to succeed and it's friendly competition and there's enough out there for all of us and I think that the not so good ones will weed themselves out and we don't worry about them anymore it's okay so it's easy to get started but it's harder than it looks and as a result there's just kind of a lot of churn in that long tail of yeah with how many dozens of companies there are in our market there's not that many that have been around well there's very very few that have been around as long as we have and there's only a handful more that have been around for you know even a decade or more so yeah i think that it's a great industry i think that we've got a lot of growth and improvement we could make within the industry i think there's a lot of big companies out there like a1 garage door service that is really doing a great job of pushing our industry to be better and to be, you know, have a new standard that we hold ourselves to.

1:01:10I think that's fantastic. You know, they get a bad look in a lot of cases, but, you know, see the forest for the trees and understand what they're trying to do. They're trying to make everybody make more money and win and offer better services to the clients. And again, you know, same thing. Create the win triangle for everybody, for our whole industry. You said Portland's a tough market. What makes Portland tough or any, you know, markets tougher than another? That's a hard one for me to answer because I only have experience within the Portland market. You know, I've heard a lot of people talk about how it's a tough market and the various things that go on that maybe make it tough.

1:01:46And it might be the competition. It might be the way that the city's laid out. I don't know because it's all I know. So I don't have a confident or intelligent, I guess, way to answer that question with experience. Works for us. I hadn't thought about literally like city planning, right? You know, if you're in Arizona, there's 20 ways to get somewhere sure if you're here you're on a house in the southwest like there's one road sure you know oh my gosh just talk about traffic i'm talking about another struggle and paying people hourly wages and is the windshield time oh my goodness even when i started i mean it was you know you go to the east side of town cool top of the truck is 15 20 minutes over there now we're going to go to the east side of town we got to plan it we got to plan the day and make sure everybody knows where we're going and you don't just hop over there anymore traffic is horrible.

1:02:29That's a huge obstacle we've had to learn how to overcome and learn how to dispatch properly and schedule accordingly.

1:02:36Alex Bridgeman: In that sense, is there value in adding offices around the city specifically for that kind of purpose? Like have a guy or one or two trucks based in, you know, Clackamas or something like that? I would definitely say yes, that there's value in that. I think that it is really spreading your resources and it would have to be well done to be efficient. I think that also part of the reason we haven't done that is we've found a lot of value in having a centralized home base where people can come and build camaraderie and have teammates within that you trust and you have relationships with. I think that having satellite offices that people really go to is fine, especially with the technology nowadays and the way that you can connect with Zoom calls and phone calls and everything else, I think could be very successful.

1:03:31But also at the same time, if you can schedule properly, going to the east side of town or whatever for us in this case, because we're in the west side, it's not that big of a deal. It's not that much of a drive. So I don't know that I see the value in having satellite offices within the same right close area market because it's not that big of a deal for us to, again, if we can schedule properly and efficiently, back to the efficient word, we can plan that out to where it's no big deal. We have all the stuff and we can still keep that centralized space where our team can come and be a team and enjoy each other and converse and get to know each other better.

1:04:06So yes, but not necessarily for us. That being said, I think if we were a whole lot bigger and a whole lot busier and had calls going all the time, we were just going gangbusters. Yeah, for sure. If we could take the 30-minute drive out and instead have everybody have a 15-minute drive every day or less, cut your drive time in half, it saves huge expense. So sure, it also saves, again, back to the employees, saves them a lot of time. They can be home sooner and be with their families, which is what people want. So yes, I think, in a much larger scale than we are at. We've talked a lot about building a garage door business, but when it comes to just building any business, you mentioned you know having a centralized location where people come together build camaraderie what are some of the things you do just from a company building standpoint you know that distinguishing guys or or that define your your culture i love that question something we've really actually tried to lean into in fact two weeks ago a little less than two weeks ago we had a company sponsored camping trip we went on my wife and i specifically i credit her a lot for this because she's really helped kind of push me into that.

1:05:16We are trying more often to do more things to get the company involvement together outside of work. I think that having relationships outside of work and getting to know your teammates that you work day in and day out with in a different fashion, in a way that was more themselves, is important to help truly understand each other and build a relationship that could be long lasting. I think having your employees be friends with each other within reason to a certain extent is a great thing to help longevity and having your employees stick around and to create that true family feel. So we try and minimum do at least one summer event and one winter event.

1:05:56You know, we do an end of the year gathering. You know, a lot of people refer to it as a Christmas party or whatever. We just try to call an end of the year celebration. Everybody gets together and, you know, we sponsor it at wherever we may go some you know local restaurant or a couple years in a row which was so much fun we did a a company sponsored escape room and you know we did that we had the idea that'd be really cool to be able to split up into two teams and do two rooms and then compete against each other and make it a fun fun game fun competition and then we would you know walk down the road to dinner and have a company dinner afterwards last year we went to langer's family fun center and we rented a room in there and had dinner and then everybody got a game card to go play in the arcade or go bowling or whatever else that type of thing i was gonna ask because it's just the employees or families too so we do the winter one we do adults only so employees and spouses the summer when we try to do all family yeah so we try to include everybody again for that reason of you get different feels of different people how are they gonna act when their kids are there how are they gonna act when there's no kids how are they gonna act if it's just employees it's everything's different and everybody acts differently in different situations and it's just really it's been really fun for me and my wife I know Katie's really enjoyed it to get to know people outside of just what you see at work every day also I have to imagine that seeing everyone's families you know knowing that you're you're a small company like you rely on each other

1:07:18Alex Bridgeman: to make money together and you know that your work is helping not just them but their spouse and their kids that you're standing in front of that is one of my biggest passions Alex I I tell everybody all the time that I love the fact that that our business is something that I can do actively every day is supporting generations and more than just my team. I'm supporting my team, their wives and their kids and their house they may own or rent or they're wanting to buy a house or whatever the case may be. I love that. You know, I mean, that's what I grew up with, right? This business supported me as I was growing up.

1:07:57It's supported my, it still supports my grandparents, right? Like we still, we still all our family and a community and support each other. Heck, we all live on the same road, you know? And it's, I, I'm just, I'm so passionate about the fact that something that I can do helps give back and help support me and my lifestyle and my family and also my teammates and their lifestyles and their families and their futures. And that's, that is like one of my largest burning passions every day on why I do what I do. I absolutely love that. have you had the summer one yet we just did the camping trip yeah that's right

1:08:30Alex Bridgeman: camp trip a couple weeks ago what are you thinking for for winter engineering do you want ideas we don't oh ideas i'm all of them for ideas well have you been to the long beach snow peak campground no Washington one of our board members went there with her her husband and it looked awesome okay that sounds fun up in winter camping yep yeah that's that's fun i mean you could yeah yeah yeah we've talked about doing like going up to like timberline lodge or something and rent a few rooms or you know something like that the winter ones are tougher because again we try to make that one the adults only thing and people can drink if they want and whatever we can control it you know we tell people if you're going to drink the company will uber you home you know you can uber there and uber back or reimburse you but yeah the the summer ones tend to be a little bit easier to to plan because you can there's more options it's nicer out you can do different things and involve the kids and you know every parent loves to do what their kids love to do so that's fun but yeah we haven't really thought too hard about this this winter one yet because we're kind of getting there still in the weeds of you know playing the summer game and dealing with the busy schedule well please bounce ideas off us too we enjoy like thinking about playing stuff like that so like we're happy to love it be a sounding board but you bet Trevor thanks for doing this this is super fun thanks for having me thanks for hosting as part of it you bet

1:09:51Alex Bridgeman: Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Think Like an Owner. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review and telling a friend to help more folks find Think Like an Owner. For full episode transcripts in our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at tlaopodcast.com.