Welcome to Close it now, an H Vac sales training podcast with Sam Wakefield.

Here we'll build your reputation in residential H Vac sales to be the expert influencer in your market.

You'll get insight into the top minds in the industry as they share their skills and hacks to help you on your journey.

This podcast isn't just about selling more, it's about understanding your customers needs and building efficiencies behind the scenes so you can sell more by but work less while being top of mind when people think H Vac.

Now let's get started with your host of the Close it now podcast.

This is Sam Wakefield.

All right, welcome back everybody.

Sam Wakefield here.

Super excited about our episode today.

This is going to be another one in the series.

There's so much going on with technology in our, in our industry right now, especially with artificial intelligence.

You can't hear it enough right now.

AI is taking over everything.

But there's a good reason for it, because this shit is just so damn cool.

And so it, and it's the coolest part is it speeds the process for so many things, for development, for the limit.

It's limitless.

And wherever our imagination can take it is what it can do.

And so today my guest is, he has he.

Not only is he in AI and development of this product which we're getting about to dive into, but he also owns and runs a heating and air company in Huntsville, Alabama.

And so it is, yeah, it's a really cool.

Because this is a product that's developed from the trades for the trades and he recognized a, a gaping hole in the marketplace and basically started developing it for himself to use and then realized on a bigger scale that it could help a lot of people.

So I'm excited, really excited to introduce Brady Glass today.

He is here to talk about his brand new launch.

He's been working on this for over a year, well over a year in product development and he's talking about AC monitor today.

So welcome to the show, Brady.

Glad to have you on.

Thanks Sam.

Thanks for the introduction.

I love it.

Yeah, man.

So tell us a little bit, give us, let's start a little bit with your backstory.

I mean every, in all the interview episodes, listeners kind of want to know where you came from.

Give us a highlight reel of, you know, how you got into the, into the trades, how long you've been running your business, et cetera, et cetera.

And then how in the world did you stumble upon this idea and get into this development?

Yeah, so I, I started whenever I was in high school, my grandfather, he owned like rental properties.

I think you have like 700 rental properties at one point.

My family has like gas state, I mean, not gas stations, car dealerships, restaurants, just like a massive portfolio grocery store, different stuff like that.

And my grandfather and all of his years of experience in owning all of these massive portfolios of different stuff was basically, he said I need to do heating and air.

And he basically had like a heating and air conditioning company on payroll that was going out to rental properties, that was going to the restaurants, fixing stuff there was going to the grocery store, going to the car dealership.

And he wanted to like reduce his cost doing that stuff.

So he thought that he would send me to a trade school to be able to learn how to, to do that.

And so I dual enrolled in a program.

Yeah, just bring it in house, right?

Yeah, bring it in house, yeah.

Dual enrolled in a program in high school and graduated high school with basically all the materials I needed for an associates, minus my generals.

Went into the military in the National Guard as a combat engineer.

Did my schooling for something completely different because I didn't like air conditioning, even though I was doing it.

Like once I actually got great, I was like, man, this kind of sucks.

It's like I was pretty good looking guy and you know, I was really worried about, you know, females and you know, like dressing nice and you know, going on dates.

And it's really hard to do that whenever you like climb out of somebody's crawl space that was like covered in cobwebs.

And so I thought I was going to be an agribusiness and like work on the new technology of these tractors and stuff like that, and met a girl, fell back into the trades to be able to support myself and my family and have made a career out of heating and air conditioning.

Never looked back then.

It is definitely something that's overlooked in society.

You know, even though you have to get your hands dirty, if you're willing to work and work really hard at whatever you do, you can definitely make a name of yourself and, and become something.

So I was very fortunate in my experience.

I, you know, was a service technician, I was an installer, I was kind of in a managing partnership of another heating and air conditioning company.

And then I was able to start my own heating and air conditioning company.

Really tried to focus in on how I can improve customer service and how can I actually gauge customer retention.

Right.

How many people are calling us and then a year or two later had an issue with something and they didn't call us back.

I have no way to be able to tell you that right now.

None.

Like I hope that we did great service.

Even the person that left us a five star review, I hope they call us back.

But people get busy, life goes on.

The last person they remember is the, the person that was working on their air conditioning system a year ago.

They liked the service, but they go on Google and try to find you.

Maybe, but maybe Google doesn't like you and Google gave your customer to some other business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

So I really bought into monitoring with customers.

There's a lot of products out there like Alert Lab, Cincy Predict, Smart ac and I've been a user of all of those products.

Scentsy Predict, they're closing their doors January 1st.

There's like saying screw the contractor.

You have hundreds of contractors out there that had their products, was able to buy their products two weeks ago and they're saying oh yeah, you don't get a refund because you bought it through a dealer like a distributor.

You're just kind of stuck with your product and we're not going to have your services online.

You've got Alert Labs which cost you like 6, $700 per air conditioning unit in hardware.

And then it still cost you several, couple probably like $5 a month to be able to monitor each air conditioning system.

And then you've got a product like Smart ac, which is funny that their name is Smart AC because it's actually really much the opposite.

I feel like it's the worst product out there for all of them.

It uses batteries, it uses Bluetooth, it uses WI fi, it only knows the temperature difference of the return and the supply.

And it's measuring it with no other data.

Doesn't know what you have your thermostat set to.

It doesn't know anything.

So if your capacitor went out on an air conditioning system, pretty common.

Smart AC thinks that you have your fan on and that the system's good.

Right?

But hopefully if you have Smart AC's product, it lasts more than a year.

But for our company we had a 98 failure rate within a year.

Oh geez.

Spending $1200 a month for 120 products.

Thankfully, smart AC was nice enough to allow me to send back 60 products after I realized that it was not a good fit for our company.

But they are requiring us to keep 60 products for two years of $10 a month.

So we're still paying $600 a month for 60 air conditioning units and we have I Think one of those 60 that's actually online and if you look at their dashboard, it says all systems are good and they're hoping that you don't actually click into it and then view it.

Abysmal numbers.

Yeah, it's terrible.

It's awful.

It's, it's really sad that they're kind of preying on the trades right now, looking at other contractors and saying, hey, this is a good product.

And then, you know, there might be somebody else that they mentioned that uses it, that's very prominent in the industry that also has invested money in it, that they use it due to the recommendations.

And then they're in the same boat that I am like a year later.

Right.

It was just a huge waste of money.

So I really focused on, on all of those three, like doing product research on all those three products.

Like what's going to be best for the contractor, what's going to be the most affordable for the contractor, what's going to have the best data.

And I did like product development for a board to be made to be able to connect to the air handler and to read, you know, is it cooling, is it heating?

And then we had these sensors that were coming off and it was going in supply and return vent.

And then we had another sensor that was even longer that would actually go down into where the filter is and it would try to read the, the current temperature in the house.

But even with all of that data, I still didn't know what the brain of the air conditioning was really doing.

Which is the thermostat.

Yeah, right.

And that was whenever it was kind of like aha.

All everything you need is in the thermostat.

You've got the run times, you've got the set points, you've got the current temperature, you've got humidity, you've got even the outdoor air temperature based weather channel.

Right.

Displayed on your smart thermostat.

Why are contractors not leveraging that data to benefit their business?

You know, the same way if you were a heart doctor and I was able offer you, I was like, hey Sam, just click this button.

I can monitor your heart and let you know if you're gonna have a heart attack or not.

Right.

I would do it.

Right?

Yeah, for sure.

As a homeowner we've experienced great results with it.

Those smart thermostats may offer something to their homeowners, but nothing for the contractor and the homeowner to be able to link together and, and start that really grinding into the customer retention and customer service aspect.

As a homeowner, it doesn't mean much value to you to get a notification from ecobee, your system isn't working correctly.

Or if you go by the thermostat, it says it's increased in temperature 4 degrees over the past three hours.

All that means to you as a homeowner is you got to find somebody to call.

Right.

It's like, oh, headache.

This is awful.

What now?

What do I do?

Crap, it's 10 o' clock on a Friday night, we just got home from a ball game and the air conditioning system isn't going to work.

Who are we going to find?

Right?

You know, maybe you're gone on vacation and you come home and the pipes are frozen because you didn't know, you know?

But now with our technology, we're reaching out to those homeowners branded for the contractor.

So it says, hey, Brady, looks like there's an issue with your system.

Here's a schedule to Sam's Heating and Air Conditioning Company.

Click this link.

And when they click the link, they're like, oh, they have a 10 o' clock appointment available.

I'm going to book it.

Yeah, that took a headache out of the contractor and the homeowner.

You can lower your market spend on Google, hopefully with this product that your customers are not going to be getting a notification.

Then going on Google to find a company and then you see who's available.

Yeah.

Trying to call or put in a Yelp request and get 10 people blowing their phone up.

Right, Exactly.

Yeah.

So I think it's a big win for the homeowner.

I think it's a huge win for the contractor.

The price point that we're offering is $5 a month per user, and that one user can have unlimited amount of thermostats.

So where we were at with like Smart AC, if you had a house that had two air conditioning systems with it, our company was paying $20 a month to monitor one person's house AC monitor.

I don't care if you have 10 properties with 20 thermostats on them, it's only going to cost you $5 a month.

It's for that one user, that one login.

Yeah.

So you're able to reduce your cost, I mean, a ton.

I have Airbnb host, I have investors that buy these rental properties and flip them, fix them, put section 8 income housing people in there that may not take care of their systems.

Well, sure.

And saw value in the monitoring through all those different companies that we tried, but a lot of those systems went offline.

And they weren't working well.

So we needed a better system to be able to monitor those and AC Monitor was the exact fit for it.

I mean, we've had great success even in the, the data testing of these.

We use those people that we had those other products with to be able to like hone in on what those software and hardware companies said about their system and versus what AC Monitor said with it.

And AC Monitor every single time was way more accurate with the data than any of the third party hardware companies were.

I'm sure that.

So tell us a little bit about it.

I mean, it sounds really intriguing.

I'm super at this point, like, okay, I need to know how this works, right?

So without getting into all of the like, you know, nuts and bolts, but say I've got Sam's AC company, right?

And you know, the company have closed it now and I want to incorporate this.

What does it take for me to install on a house?

It's super simple.

All you got to do is just sign up, click a sign up button, type in the information about your company, Sam's H Vac company, where you're located, and then you add a credit card.

There's no fee for you to create an account.

Okay.

So every contractor should just create an account just so you're listed on AC Monitor.

But then for you to deploy that with your customers, all you gotta do is just type in your customer name, phone number, email address, and then click send their login information to your customer.

That customer logs in, they sign into their thermostat data and then boom, your company is now monitoring that household.

You planted that flag inside of that home forever.

Wow.

So does it take a specific thermostat or.

We need to make sure that they're.

I mean, so.

But what if I'm hearing you right.

It has to be universal for a contract.

I need to be able to do Nest.

I need to be able to do Honeywell.

I need to be able to do eob, I need to have train, I need to have carrier.

It's got to be a universal platform.

It doesn't matter what the dealer has or the homeowner has, right?

It's got to be able to take all the thermostats.

So that's exactly what our company does.

We went live with ecob in like a week, we'll have Honeywell completed and Nest completed.

And then we're working with manufacturers like Daikin, Carrier, Trane and those to be able to get it online.

Even if we don't get all of the perfect permissions of what we want from those companies.

We'll be able to use the amount of data that they are willing to give us to be able to determine the same amount of data that Ecobee and Honeywell and stuff is nice with Carrier and Trane and some of these other companies like Daikin, these thermostats are getting so smart with the communicating systems.

Correct.

That they know what the problem is.

But contractors, we just need a platform that we can have all the thermostats for all of our customers on.

Right.

And then brand that to the company.

Because if a homeowner says, hey, your sensor is, is bad and your unit's not working because the sensor, they still got to find your information and call you.

Sure.

So hopefully with training carrier and all that stuff, they'll give us full access to the communicating systems for the contractors to be able to say, hey, this is an issue.

Maybe we should check on this part availability before we show up there.

Sure, yeah, absolutely.

So it sounds like too, it's a cool opportunity to promote, as we're promoting this in the home, not only to promote the service that we can offer and definitely a differentiator to the homeowner, but it's a beautiful way to obviously sell a smart thermostat.

At the same time, if they don't have one or they're, you know, theirs is inadequate, then we can just also upgrade the, upgrade the control system on the wall.

It's the only sexy thing about air conditioning.

You know, the homeowner 100% they, they'll buy the cheapest of the cheap system and the first thing they'll ask you is, can I control it from my phone?

Yeah, you know, yeah, sure you can.

You know, like they want that.

It's the technology with smart thermostats I like to reference as the same as smartphones and flip phones.

Yeah.

Old people we love, you know, loved the flip phones.

I had a flip phone.

It was a great phone.

But the second I got a smartphone, I never owned another flip phone.

Never go back.

Yep, never go back.

And that's what's great about being able to monitor your customer is you're going to be able to follow that customer.

Even if they get a new house, the likelihood of them switching from a smart thermostat to a dumb thermostat or even a different brand is very, very, you know, less.

If somebody has an iPhone, the chances of them going Android is going to be really, you know, few.

Sure.

So same thing.

If you have an Ecobee thermostat.

The chances of that homeowner, they sell their house, they go into the new house, they sign in with their ecobee thermostat.

Your heating and air conditioning company had to do nothing to be able to monitor their new.

Follow them to the new place.

You're following them no matter where they go.

That's cool.

I love this.

It makes me think too.

So my, of course my sales training brain, my marketing brain is like good going nuts right now.

So for everybody listening, if I were you owning this company, and this is exactly how I did with my God, I started this in Geez, 2010.

The second, the very first 10 or 11.

It was the second.

The very first.

Because Ecobee was first to market with a WI fi thermostat.

The very first one that came out, I found somebody, I said, listen, I will install this sucker at cost.

Let me play with your system and I'll install it for you.

So I personally went out, I installed it, and from that moment forward, the second I hooked it up and his eyes lit up, my eyes lit up.

And from that moment forward, every single system we ever installed new, it didn't matter what level it was.

Of course, higher levels got better thermostats.

But we found even for the most basic rock bottom system, a WI fi compatible thermostat.

And that was included as part of our install package.

So for starting in 2010, 2011, we were differentiating.

It's like, hey, go with us.

And this is included and it's, we don't even charge extra.

It's just part, it's part of the complete system.

So if you're listening to this and you were me, I would 100% jump on this train and make this.

It doesn't matter the system or even a single component piece.

A new thermostat, if they don't already have one that's compatible, is included in this.

And that way you can monitor that system.

And then this is a major differentiator to market to be like, listen, we know what's going on your equipment.

We don't, we're not, don't need to know anything about the house.

This is not a security issue.

But just like you were saying, hey, if you were having a heart attack and we could predict it ahead of time, wouldn't you want to know?

And man, instantly customer retention.

So every single system that gets installed, you now have this capability to just have the instant con, instant connectivity.

I don't need to be calling anybody, man, this is so cool, man.

My head's about to explode.

Yeah.

So it's going to brand your company so much better.

Imagine that the people that are at work, because a lot of people in the trades right now, they're wondering, man, what happened this year from last year?

Why are we down?

You know, sure, distributors nationally are down 30 to 40%.

I just got off with Service Hero.

The search is on Google are down 30 to 40%.

You know, so it's, it's a line.

But why is that?

Is it because, you know, we have somebody in office that's not doing a good job and economy is not great?

Maybe, you know, is it because people are back at work and not at their house?

Definitely.

You know, like, sure, politics aside, it doesn't matter, but people at home are, are not working from home anymore.

They are going back to work.

So them sitting at their house and saying, oh man, it kind of got hot and it's the hottest part of the day.

Maybe I should have my air conditioner checked out.

Goodbye customer.

They're at office and the office is making sure that they're conditioned and hopefully they came home and it was working well.

So that's, that's where our company really improves.

That is whenever your customer is in the office and they get a notification from Sam's air Conditioning, it says, hey, it looks like your system has an issue.

That person says to their other coworker, hey, my heating and air conditioning company just let me know I have an issue with the air conditioning system.

And they're going to say, well, how did they do that?

Yeah, you know, like, well, they're monitoring my unit all the time.

Oh, my company doesn't do that.

I had to try to call them and they didn't even answer the phone.

Right.

Your company reaches out to you proactively.

Yeah, I don't even have to think about who I need to call anymore.

I just call Sam.

You know, I just deal with Sam.

Sam takes care of everything and that's what's going to separate you whenever you go and like sell those high ticket items.

Even if you're selling a base level system for a couple of grand more than your competitor.

Is your competitor a reactive company or is your competitor a proactive company?

Right.

And that's where we're going to see a big shift and change in the next like 5, 10 years of companies that, hey, I decided to go with this software and they increased our revenues this much over the course of the year versus a company that didn't go with the software in that same territory.

And for that same company to try to get their customer back, it's going to be really hard to try to pry a customer that was stolen from you by another company that's monitoring your customer.

Especially if you're offering this to your customer for free, no cost to them.

They have no reason to say no.

Right.

And the main thing is we have to tell them.

Right?

If we don't tell them, it might as well not have happened.

And so everybody listening.

Yes, it's cool to sign up with this and start rolling it out, actually implementing it.

But if you don't let your homeowner know what you're doing with it, and it's just hidden behind the scenes until all of a sudden they get a notification that maybe you told them one time when you installed it or when you initially installed, but they will forget.

So this has to become part of your messaging also, because we've got to keep this constantly in front of the homeowner.

Like, hey, we did this.

We're constant.

We, we are the unique in this, in this town.

We're the only ones watching your system all the time, right?

So even better, we help out the contractor even with that.

So every month, the heating and air conditioning contractor will be sending a text message and email notification to those homeowners.

And it would say, hey, Brady, it's time to replace your filter Sam's Air Conditioning Company.

And if you sell a filter to your company, we're not trying to take any business away from you as a heating and air conditioning company at all.

I don't want the homeowner to know that AC monitor is even a business.

I want them to only know Sam's Heating and Air.

So this gives you a prime ability to be able to sell filters to your customers.

If you're not currently doing that already, sign up with like Jackson Filters or Filter Fetch or, you know, whatever, and then make that an additional income in your own business.

Allow our software to increase that side of customer service.

You can easily do drop shipping filters.

There's like a thousand programs out there, right?

Give us that link that you want us to send filters for you, and then we'll do the work for you.

We'll add that additional income for you.

Love it.

And then once a year or twice a year, however your company decides to do this, we'll send them a reminder email and text message.

Hey, Sam, it's time to have your system maintained.

So if you're offering monitoring to customers that it's not even your preventative maintenance customer, you're going to get more customers that are going to be wanting maintenance.

If you're actually messaging every year, you're putting that thought in your head every year, hey, it's time to have my system maintained.

Maybe they forgot one year, second year, like, crap, I forgot last year.

I need to do it this year, you know, so.

So with this.

So a couple questions come up and for everybody listening, I love these kind of episodes because Brady and I haven't really talked about this a lot ahead of time.

So this is.

These are like, just questions that are coming to my mind.

Can you, as a contractor, can I go in and do any specific, like, blasts out to that homeowner or does it have to be on that regular schedule?

So, yeah, I mean, with our.

Whenever a contractor signs up with us, they input a.

A customer to us.

We'll send out a text message and an email that's branded to the contractor for that homeowner to sign up.

Once that customer signs up in their thermostat details, our system does kind of work behind the scenes.

We will do whatever you tell us to do.

Filter reminders aren't once a month.

Maybe they're two months.

Every six months, depending on what kind of filter you have in there.

Maintenance reminders need to be sent every six months or 12 months, depending how you operate.

We'll send those out for you.

But anytime that the system is not performing correctly, your company does reach out to them.

I'm not sure you know what else that you would want it to do.

You said you want it to.

Yeah.

Say we've got a.

Well, let's just use like what I would do right now.

Right.

So right now we are November 1st.

And so I would do like a maybe a fall furnace special.

And.

But the messaging around it would be make sure your furnace is working in time for Thanksgiving type of some.

Some kind of message.

Right.

What's even cooler, so I'm gonna blow your mind with this is we're gonna be able to place ads on your thermostat.

Wow.

Really?

So not.

Doesn't really matter what thermostat is signed in.

You'll be able to push it out that way.

So whenever you want to do your fall special or whatever, you know, like, yeah, we'll send out the reminder whenever you want us to, and we can make it verbiage.

Whatever you want.

You can customize it.

Absolutely.

So I'll hop in and be like, hey, Brady, I need to run a flash sale for this week only.

Blah, blah, blah.

Here's the messaging boom.

Send this.

Yeah.

I mean, it's even easier now.

The contractor can.

He can just use in his account and he can type in what he wants and when those notifications stuff need to go out.

But with say it's like Christmas time.

And what's even cool with our software is technician.

And whenever he's out there, he can click that customer's account, scan their barcode on their equipment, and says, that equipment's eight years old.

Okay.

But maybe in our Software at year 10, you have a prompt that whenever their system gets 10 years or older, and you want to do a Christmas special for systems that are 10 years and older, and you can automate text message saying, $500 off a unit replacement.

Merry Christmas, Sam's Air Conditioning Company.

Nice.

But it was actually displayed on your thermostat that a customer walked by in their house, and it said, $500 off unit replacement, Sam's Air Conditioning.

Right.

And they have to go.

To get past it.

Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome, man.

I'm loving this.

This is so cool.

And so it's like, it's.

I love this because, you know, we lost as an industry, we lost real estate on the wall when Nest came in and they stole that space from the industry.

And so I love this because this is a way to get it back, which has not been available up until now.

And that's been the constant conversation for the last decade.

Is it's our fault because we didn't tell homeowners we had these.

So somebody from outside the industry came in and did it for.

And they stole our space.

That's why Google bought Nest, so they could own that space, because that was the hub for home automation for Google Home and all of that.

And so to be able to come back in and say, hey, wait a minute, we're taking back over this real estate.

It's ours.

We claim it.

Let's get back there.

Is so cool.

Yeah.

So what's even cooler is in my perfect, ideal world, I guess my big secret and stuff is I would love to kick Google out of our space.

The in a dream world, contractors that are listening to this service, technicians that are listening to this, if they talk to their contractor, you know, the business owner or the business owner themselves, they're like, you know what?

Screw Google.

My company, we spend 20 grand a month on Google Ads, and I get a.

An unbelievable amount of bad leads, you know, and the Google Ad cost for that is more and more and more.

And then you look at like Google themselves are like, Boasting all these great revenues and stuff.

And it's like, yeah, that part is me.

I'm paying.

You sure do a terrible job.

But I don't have anywhere else to go because I can't run like a yellow book ad in a notebook.

I mean, anymore.

That would be useless, you know, but if we were able to take back the space inside of the H Vac trades by developing a better relationship with the customers through this software, your customer's not going to have a chance to go to Google.

Sure.

You know, they don't need to.

Yeah.

It's the path of least resistance to that owner now.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, and that's, it's.

God, I love this.

I love this so much.

It marries so well with.

You know, I say often, especially anymore, one is anything that's been done the same way for 50 years and more is ripe for revolution.

And this is, these are some of the things that is helping us move our industry along.

Our industry is two decades behind for most technology.

I mean, I've been preaching from the rooftops for 10 years.

Why in the world do we even have to run control wire anymore?

Come on, guys.

I mean, it's, it's absurd.

Some of the things that we still have to do in the trade because the industry tightens that they just have not progressed in technology.

And so I love that we are now getting these types of things to, to help move us along.

And it marries so well with the.

So like I, I've said, you know, when it comes to like sales training and all those kind of things, man, if there's a box that H Vac lives in, I live outside that sucker.

So I'm constantly looking for ways to do things differently.

That's why I'm all about door knocking right now.

Because talk about that customer acquisition cost in the Google.

Well, if, and we don't know what kind of leads are coming in, you could be driving up to a junkyard or a house that it's an empty lot for that matter.

We bought this lead, but, well, it just was a bad one.

When we're door knocking, we know exactly what neighborhood we're in.

We know the demographic, we know the house, we know the homeowner, and we worked on their neighbor's house.

And so this, this compliments that so well because now we can like plant our company's flag in every single house and message that.

So something I thought about, if you don't mind me, going into a little bit of, of like sales training for this here.

Companies when you get with Brady and you sign up, you're the owner, you're the, it doesn't matter who you are, if you're the consultant, if you're the technician, whoever you are, when this home, when you get your system live and active in that homeowner's house, do not just let them send them that link and fingers crossed and hope for the best that they're going to sign up for this.

You are going to be there in the house with them or on zoom with them and be okay.

Did you get the link?

Great.

Now click it, open it up, I will help you walk through this registration and that five minutes of your time will be worth, literally will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you or millions of dollars to you by taking that step to ensure that the registration happens.

Because if you don't, just like we're talking about barrier of entry with the homeowner, if there's extra steps, they won't do it.

How many times have you gone out and homeowner was supposed to register their warranties and they didn't and we had to break the bad news to them.

That's why so many good companies have taken homeowner warranty registration in house.

So you do it for them.

It's the same thing.

So make sure you're walking them through this registration purchase.

Would you agree with me, Brady, on that one?

Man, I, I love everything you've said there.

Because our company, the way that we're going to try to dominate Huntsville is I've never done door knocking ever.

I mean, I did, honestly, whenever I first started because I didn't even know how to advertise.

I bought door hangers and I door knocked.

Yep.

Our company is going back to the the roots and we're going to offer door knocking.

Whenever people say, oh, no, I don't want to buy anything from you to be able to offer them, hey, how about this free service that we're going to offer you?

All we want to do is just let you know if you have an issue with your air conditioning system.

That's it.

Just let us let you know if there's an issue with your air conditioning system.

Right.

And then you can decide if you want to use this then or not.

So that's how we're going to be implementing this with our company, is we're going to get more out of the Google space.

We're going to be hiring people to go door to door offering services door to door.

But at the least, who doesn't want Something for free.

Ask your homeowner, do you want to come home to an uncomfortable house?

No, I don't want to come to an uncomfortable house.

Well, let me help you.

No cost.

If you have a smart thermostat already, let's just link it up and I can at least take away that pain from you ever again.

Right.

And even if not, then it's like, hey, no problem.

We have a special promotion right now.

Not listed.

Not trying to sell you anything else.

We have a special promotion right now with the.

In the thermostat that would get this done for you at this price, and then you're never going to have to worry about being caught off guard ever again.

Exactly.

So we, we're doing that same thing, too.

I mean, we're going to have vans.

Just.

All they have is just ecobee thermostats inside of them, and they're going to be cruising down, knocking on doors, trying to sell thermostats, trying to sell monitoring, because we want that lifetime customer, you know, and for, for them, if they don't have even the funds to be able to purchase a smart thermostat installed, we have the ability to offer them 0% financing up to 72 months for, for a smart thermostat.

So, I mean, like, I'm giving people.

Like, literally $4 a month.

For $4 a month, we can, you know, and so what we're actually doing is we're just having them on a 999 plan.

Yeah.

And basically what that does is it gives them a one visit a year and a free smart thermostat, you know, but they have to have so many years with us in order to pay for that thermostat.

Sure.

You know, but it's the, it's, it's all financed through, like, Wells Fargo.

So basically we're just trying to sell that and then tie in that relationship, you know, with them for that long term.

And I think we're going to have great success with that.

You know, we launched today, we have hundreds of users that whenever we were developing this through our own company, but we haven't went to market inside of Huntsville, and we're about to start to do that now.

Love it.

Love it.

Man, this is so cool.

I mean, this is one of the coolest conversations I've had in a while because I, you know, it's, it's refreshing, too, and for everybody.

Listen, yes, we're going to get back into some sales training with different interviews and stuff, of course, but there's way too damn Much exciting things going on in technology within our space.

You know, I, I've been in ATRAC 18 years and it was so long when there was zero innovation, you know, and it's been really within maybe the last five years that finally we're starting to see things that are, you know, and there were some bits and pieces here and there, but finally within the last three to five years, we're starting to see some truly innovative things that, you know, finally that have come around.

And so it's really exciting for me to see and to especially something that's so practical.

So quick recap everybody.

There's no bells and whistles.

You don't have to hook up all these sensors.

There's not a huge, there's not a high cost of material.

This is strictly a service.

It's software as a service, basically, if you know what that means, a SaaS and they register and it's insanely low cost to you per user.

It doesn't matter how many systems are in the house.

It doesn't matter how many thermostats we're getting connected because it's about the, the user.

Right.

Am I correct in that, Randy?

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't care if you have 50 rental properties.

Right.

So that'd be five bucks that one guy.

You know, if you got an apartment complex and you're trying to better develop a relationship between that apartment complex and apartment complex manager.

Yeah.

You know, you can do the whole entire apartment complex for five bucks.

You know, that's nuts.

Yeah.

If you have just a one person, it's elderly lady, then maybe she doesn't know how to use a smart thermostat or something like that, but her kids do or something.

She has one air conditioning system.

Five bucks, you know, very.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, that's all.

I hadn't even thought about that.

You know, the peace of mind of senior citizens and those types of things.

I mean, I can't tell you how many clients we used to have that we work directly with their, you know, with the, the, their kids, you know, obviously adult kids that, you know, we're constantly over there monitoring their mom or dad or whoever's the houses.

And we'd even put up, I mean, sometimes we would get.

They would tired of getting calls.

Hey, how do you work this?

So we would, in years ago, we wouldn't do this.

We would install something that we could monitor almost hidden and then we would install kind of the, the dummy thermostat right out in the main area.

And so they couldn't play with it.

Yeah.

Throw some batteries in it.

Or put like an old.

We had just an old slider, you know, up and put that on the wall.

And they were happy campers because they could adjust that all day long.

Yeah.

And they felt.

They felt like they were control of it and they were fine and no longer were, oh, it's too hot, it's too cold.

I don't know how to do it.

But then the real thermostat, their kids would just run via WI fi on their phone from across town.

Hey.

They check in at home.

Hey, is it too warm, too cold?

Are you good over there?

Oh, yeah, we're fine.

We just adjusted our thermostat.

It's great.

And it got rid of so many complaints.

So this is interesting because it makes me remember those stories of doing that.

But this is to the better level.

Right.

We're actually able to know what's happening with the equipment.

It's more, you know, and can actually predict.

Predict failures.

You know, this is.

I mean, when I toured factories 10 years ago, the engineers were talking about this kind of technology, but they just failed to execute it.

Right.

And so, yeah, I think there's a.

Lot of those manufacturers and everybody they look out for, who is their direct customer, the consumer, you know, and the contractor.

We get left out of the picture almost all the time.

You know, there's.

There's all these types of areas out there that are, hey, the local government, you know, they're protecting the homeowners with all their, you know, local laws, making sure that the contractors doing the right job, manufacturers, making sure that they're doing what the government says to do.

Nothing out there is like, hey, this is an area that's just for contractors.

Unless you have, like, space like yours.

You know, like your podcast is, hey, we're.

We're contractors.

We're people in the trades working together.

We're talking about things that can benefit us, you know, and with this software, I'm hoping that it will give contractors a better leg to be able to say, we're offering you that new level of customer service.

We should be able to have the ability to also change the temperature for those customers.

So if you do have that, you know, older lady and she calls and she's like, my air conditioning system, it just keeps getting hotter and hotter in here.

And then you go on our account, you say, oh, yes, Ms. Jones, it actually looks like you have your system set for heat, not cooling.

Right.

Can we fix that for you?

Yeah, I've got no idea.

How to do that?

Your company.

No problem.

We got you.

Yeah.

Saved it.

You didn't have to deploy a vehicle out there to check anything.

You know, that level of customer service and then to be able to focus on real problems whenever they really occur.

Yeah.

Is it going to be.

Is going to be significant?

I think in the next 10 years as people are phasing out dumb thermostats and they're implementing more.

You know, I think you should look at the demo, the graph on that.

I mean it's like exponential how many people are smart thermostats and they're getting rid of the ones.

Right.

The other thing that this is gonna.

I'm sorry I cut you off there.

Good.

No, you're good.

Yeah, totally.

This is a topic of conversation that's coming up more and more often is this is going to be a fantastic way to mitigate what the.

So the conversation is around like manufacturers going direct to consumers and so just having, you know, the whole online shopping model, you know, there's literally nothing right now stopping, you know, Daikin carrier Trane, Linux ream, you name it, from putting up a website that says shop here.

And then they just have a company hired person come and do the install and cut out the contract, cut out both the distributor and the contractor completely out of the picture.

And so what this will do is it's going to mitigate a lot of that by allowing us to stay very much in touch with that homeowner.

And they're calling us and they're scheduling.

They're just immediately not just calling us, they're immediately scheduling with what's happening here and us to be able to stay in front of them instead of having to.

It's going to slow that roll a little bit, I think, and really push that off.

We're going to have to embrace a lot of that model because that's a lot of where we're headed.

But personally I feel there's always going to be room for personal relationship and plenty of people.

The more people buy online and that's why I love door knocking because the more people buy online, the more less personal interaction homeowners have and they appreciate a conversation with a real person.

And so there's always going to be room for what we do.

It just might look a little different over time.

And I love this because this is a great bridge to a lot of things.

Yeah, I think just like you said with the whole, especially with COVID everybody was shopping online, you know, everybody was doing everything from online businesses like my size that, that started during COVID We boomed because of online presence.

But to see people that haven't spent time with their, you know, family, friends and co workers, and then you as the air conditioning guy walk into that person's house, mask or no mask, they were like just happy to have a human interaction.

Oh yeah.

I had a lady literally cry and she was like, she moved to Huntsville for a job, wasn't able to go to work because of COVID She doesn't know anybody in town, she doesn't do anything.

She goes to the grocery store and she goes home and that was it.

And she was literally in tears just to have a human interaction with me.

Just fixing her air conditioning system, you know.

Oh yeah, 100.

If she's going to use this again, because I'm not able to figure out customer retention and anything right now.

Right.

Well, that's, you know, obviously that's where the other elements that we've always done is, you know, get them on the newsletter, reach out.

I mean, I'm all about like that contact.

It's like anybody who's worth their damn as a consultant should have.

Listen, everybody, I'm, I'm not going to make any bones about this.

If you want to have clients for life that give you referrals and you don't have to beat your head against the wall, you're going to set up a calendar that's got a 3 month, 6 month and 12 month reminder to personally call every single homeowner you've ever installed a system with and ask them what they love best about it.

And every single time you talk to them, you're going to ask them, who do you know that I can help?

And you're going to write them, keep a log of every single person you've ever done business with, that's ever done business with you and send them a handwritten Christmas card.

We'd go back to these old like, how to swim with Harvey McKay, how to swim with the sharks without getting eaten alive type of gorilla like before computers existed, type of interpersonal connection, relationship based things.

Sending handwritten letters every single time you're in a home for a visit.

Sell it or not, right?

Send a little thank you card.

We get back to this and, and we are not going to suffer for finding clients.

But they're easy to do and they're easy not to do with.

Somebody put in the work to do that.

I used to do that in the field and I used to do probably 3 to 500,000 in pipeline business every single year.

Strictly from people calling me up that said, hey, you did such a great job for my friend or boy, we remembered you from last time or whatever it was, man, we got your card and it's time to move forward.

Two years later, three years later, you answer the phone and they're like, oh, I'm so glad you still work for them.

We finally saved the money.

Even though our credit's crap, right?

That doesn't happen if you don't stay in touch.

So this is.

I love marrying high tech and low tech at the same time.

And this is that same philosophy that does that for us.

So, man, I'm digging it.

Brady, thanks for being on the show today, man.

So how do people.

I think we may hopefully have got some people excited about this.

I know, I'm stoked about this.

How do people reach out to you?

How do they find you?

How do they get involved?

How they roll it into their company and, you know, what does that look like?

Yeah.

So, I mean, if anybody wants to find me, I'm easy reachable.

LinkedIn, Facebook, I mean, wherever my name is not common.

Brady.

B R A D Y Glaus G L A U S if you want to sign up for the software, you can find that on acmonitor.com literally just click the sign up page.

Pricing, everything is laid out.

Very easy to read.

The software itself, I mean, it's so simple to navigate.

I'm not trying to confuse anybody.

Simpler is better whenever it comes to tech.

And that's what we're really focused on is just making it a simple, easy product for the contractor, for the homeowner and bridging that gap just exactly like you said.

If you need to contact me directly, my personal cell phone number, you know, I'm happy to give is 256-655-0300.

Shoot me a text, give me a call.

Preferably text over calls, because I have a lot of different meetings and stuff.

Right.

I'm with you.

Yeah, just, you know, reach out.

Because I would love to see contractors that implement something and then be able to look back in like a year and meet with them and be like, man, look, in the past year we grew this much, you know, and we were able to do this much.

I mean, be able to gauge those kind of numbers is incredible.

And maybe you're a small company and you can't afford, you know, $5 a user right now.

Maybe, you know, money is really hitting you tight with the economy and the way that the trades have been down this year.

Resell our product.

You Know, like have that ability inside of our software.

If you can't afford the $5 a month for the user, you're able to pass that on to the homeowner, connect your stripe account, resell that for five bucks, maybe do a break even or do what we're doing.

We're offering a 9.99 plan and just come out once a year.

Don't offer coil cleanings, don't offer any of that stuff.

Just get yourself in the door.

And that one hour visit is just for you to show up and then look at their air conditioning system and be able to resell those indoor air quality product systems.

Sell that coil clean, do a good.

Discovery, ask them how they're, what they're experiencing, what their concerns are.

Right.

And if we could improve that, would that help?

You know, would you like to see what that might look like to fix it?

Yeah.

Love it, man.

So cool.

So acmonitor.com also, everybody listening.

Brady is in the close it Now Facebook group.

Him and I have been back and forth actually over a few years now.

We've chatted periodically and and so he is in the close it Now Facebook group.

So jump on Facebook, join the close it Now Facebook group.

And you can also find him in there and reach out.

That is a great gathering point for just about every person I've ever had as an interview.

Are typically in the group and are active in there also.

So acmonitor.com also give us your phone number one more time.

256-655-0300.

So that phone number.

Text him first.

Don't.

You could call, but text first, please.

And yeah, he'll schedule with you before we get on this.

He's literally been constantly on interviews for like four hours before this one.

So this is our five for him and join the Facebook group.

So super excited about this product.

AC Monitor is changing the game for sure.

It's making it simple, man.

We don't need a bunch of other data, like all of the measurements and stuff.

If something's going wrong, it's going wrong and we got to get there to fix it.

That's the important part.

And I love it.

It keeps it simple for the homeowner, simple for the contractor.

Remember, once you get enrolled, make sure you're helping the homeowner sign up.

You have to walk them through the process.

You know, adoption rate.

If you don't go and do that is the word is abysmal.

So make sure it happens and it's worth your time.

It will literally be the difference of million dollars and millions of dollars in revenue.

If you take five minutes to walk a homeowner through the registration process.

Worth every, every second of this.

Every single second.

So last couple things, we have a couple big announcements.

One is the, the course, the online course is out.

So I'm excited about that.

You can check that out.

We talked a lot.

This is cool because we talked a lot about door knocking today.

It's, it's the highest, the highest ROI that you can get for any type of marketing period.

I will fight you on that as long as the day is.

And all night too because I can prove it to you over and over.

It's just insane what happens.

So it's how companies are scaling right now.

It's literally how, you know, in other industries companies scale from, you know, a million dollars to $100 million in like two years.

And I'm not even exaggerating those kind of numbers.

It happens all the time.

So you, your number one job will become how fast can we hire people to production to keep up with the people that are on the doors making the sales, the carnivores, the hunters that are out there.

And so we don't rely on the weather anymore.

We create our own weather.

That's the beautiful part of this because it keeps us in touch with homeowners as well.

So we're catching.

It's another way to catch people further up the funnel with the leading metrics instead of getting.

Relying on lagging metrics to.

To keep up with that.

So H vacdoors.net is the where the online.

It's got my whole cell system there, everybody.

It's H. VACU is the name of the course and it also has an entire module that Sam Taggart and I recorded together that has all scripting on door knocking.

So if anybody wants, whoever wants to roll that out, you can get some good scripts there.

And then also of course with my training, I will come to your company, I will train your company on the cell system that guarantees results.

And we are seeing the data is in every time we're out in the field.

We're closing on average right around 70% in home once it closes.

And it's just beautiful and people are asking us for it.

And so that's the cell system that's in there.

And then I'm going to be a speaker at door to door con7 in January 25th, 26th, 27th, that same link, h vacdoors.net you can get your tickets there under the event link.

Make sure to Use the discount code SAMW10.

That's S A M W the numbers 10 SAMW10 for a 10% discount.

If you are wanting to get your, get your company into the door knocking space to literally blow your company up with this, this process, get there, get your team there, it's going to be a room full of about 5 to 6,000 hunters, 5 to 6,000 carnivores who are literally what most people in H vac don't know is there are hundreds, literally hundreds of people across the country, individuals making over a million dollars personal income, knocking doors every year, selling all kinds of things.

And that's a much lower ticket item than H Vac.

So if we adopt this the as an industry, it's.

The entire industry is about to freaking explode.

So I'm leading the charge on that.

I'm one of the speakers.

Lance Armstrong is going to be a speaker.

Chris Voss of the Black Swan Group wrote never split the difference is a speaker.

Sean White, the Olympic gold medalist is going to be a speaker.

Sam Taggart, of course, and then, and me and a bunch of others too.

So it's going to be exciting.

So get to the event.

I can't talk about it enough.

And if you've ever gotten value from this podcast, leave me a five star review.

Your company lives and dies on reviews and my podcast and my sales training does also.

So I would love.

If you've gotten value, please leave me a five star review.

And that is it for the infomercial portion of this episode.

But it's important information.

Just as important when you're in the home to ask for reviews for yourself.

Right?

Ask reviews.

Did we provide five star service today?

Well, here.

And so here's your quick nugget for the day.

Implement this immediately.

Instead of saying, hey, go leave me a review and walking out of the house, say, hey, did we do five star service for you today?

Great.

Go ahead and grab your phone super quick.

Let me show you how to, how to get there and show you the exact place to go where we need the reviews the most or where we would love the reviews the most and have them pull out their phone and lead them right to exactly where you want them to leave the review and get them started.

And then you're, you're going to watch your review number explode just by that little bit of directive.

So it makes such a big difference.

So I am not about leaving things to chance.

We take, we take radical responsibility for our, for our destination and for our results.

And so that's what we do.

So thanks for joining me, Brady.

It's been a good, been a great conversation and I'm excited about ACMonitor.

ACMonitor.com y'.

All.

Go get it.

I don't see a single company that shouldn't implement this.

Not a single one.

If you, if you don't implement this and somebody across town does, you've just lost a, you've just lost a homeowner, you've just lost a client.

So be the, be a first mover and make this happen.

And other than that, everybody go save the world one heat stroke at a time.

Let's go save the world one frostbite at a time.

Thanks for listening to Close it now with Sam Wakefield.

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