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 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.

Hey, hey, hey.

Welcome back to the Close it now solar and H Vac sales training podcast.

Sam Wakefield here today I'm super excited to introduce our guest and he is in the spotlight.

This is somebody I actually just met recently.

Thank you.

Chris Wisniewski introduced us and I'm really stoked about this because my history, which I haven't really talked about a lot in the podcast, but for about five years personally I owned a company called Dr. Energy Saver, part of the largest home performance dealer network in the country.

And so a lot of my background and my training is in home performance.

If you don't know what home performance is, shame on you.

You should know what home performance is.

But basically on since this is the sales trading podcast, how houses use and lose energy is home performance.

And how do we, how do we tighten up the envelope, how do we increase the, just the overall efficiency of a home and you know, to, to use less, you know, reduce our consumption.

And this guy is basically become the expert in home performance in the country and arguably the world.

He wrote, in fact he wrote the book on it.

So I'm, I'm super happy to introduce.

He's the CEO of H Vac 2.0.

Also he has book, the Home Comfort Book.

It's a true 101 for building science.

There's some other books out there.

He wrote this book because there wasn't really a basic how do we get into how to learn the basics of home performance?

Because everything out there was just theory.

This is actual practical application from day in, day out, helping homeowners solve their problems, reduce the usage.

He's also one of the pioneers and big proponent of the electrify everything movement that is happening right now and it's called Nate the House Whisperer.

So I'm super excited to introduce our guest today, Nate Adams.

How are you doing, sir?

I'm doing great, Sam.

Yeah, it's kind of funny.

How on earth did we not cross paths before now?

World is not very big.

Like, it's just weird that that happened.

I've been around this world for a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just, it's, it's very strange because Dr. Energy Saver, like, I've been aware of that for a long time.

Actually.

Larry Janeski's book that you hand out to leads in part inspired what I wrote.

Beautiful.

So.

So that was part of it.

And another one was I learned how to wire a house from a book.

It was like a Black and Decker book.

But it did a good job of laying out here's the theory of how things work, here's the tools you need, and here's how you do a basic outlet.

And then you work your way up to like a three way switch.

And actually I had the hardest three way switch ever.

It was knob and tube.

It was unmarked.

Oh no.

It turned out that the three way switch was bad.

But you know how hard it is to figure that out.

Like, and I wasn't smart enough yet to, to have a, a tester.

So I'm just like, just fighting my way through it.

And then I get to the end.

I'm like, if I just would have a multimeter, just wouldn't have been that bad.

Yeah.

But like, you just felt super.

But like I was learning from a book.

I didn't know what I was doing.

Yeah.

But I wanted there to be an actual place for people that don't understand it.

Home performance.

And actually I've come to really hate the phrase, frankly, because it's really squishy to define and pretty much eyes glaze over every time.

Absolutely.

And so many things could fall into the category.

And under that umbrella that especially a lot of companies try to include things under that umbrella that don't belong.

And some things that should be there, nobody even thinks about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean that's, that's a consistent thing within the H VAC world.

Most people think about the box, but not that many.

Backup to look at the ductwork.

And definitely hardly anybody backs up to look at the whole house.

Right.

But the, the mission that my partner and I have been on for like a decade now is the building science to make houses truly comfortable and truly healthy.

Mm.

We've had it for 20 years.

Oh, easily so.

And we had it longer.

But like, we've really screwed the pooch.

Back in the 70s, we've tightened houses and then we put vapor barriers in them and we didn't give them Ventilation.

We were just trying to save energy and we ended up making houses wet and nasty and people got sick.

That's where sick building syndrome came in.

And then we had to fight our way through the weatherization program.

Low income weatherization.

Really figured a lot of stuff out.

We have Joe Stiebrick who talks about learning from the old guys.

And now he is one of the old guys, which is kind of funny.

But that, that happens to all of us.

When I first started into this, I was in my mid-20s.

Now I'm in my mid-40s.

Right.

Yeah.

I was going to ask you how you.

So yeah, we'll circle back and give us your kind of backstory and how you got into this too.

The dumb story.

But it started with I needed a job like too many stories do.

But we, we've been trying to figure out how do we actually get this applied at scale.

So like home performance people like our practice in Cleveland, which we decided to move to West Virginia.

And I'm like, I have to do this on site.

So the practice is gone.

Like the.

But we could do 10 or 20 houses a year doing projects.

And every Monday night we're doing a show, the H Vac 2.0 show, where we're.

We're looking at various things and we've done several case studies here on past projects that we've done.

And they could be pretty gnarly.

Like this last one was this crazy 5,000 square foot house with multiple additions and had seven or eight different attics.

We had to figure out how to treat.

We treated those.

It had three H Vac systems.

We added two dehumidifiers.

We still didn't really fix a whole bunch of stuff in the house.

Unfortunately.

Like, you know, I go through why there are a lot of sales process groups that I made sure that's like coming back to this.

But we know how to fix these things.

But we need kind of a McDonald's sort of process.

We need some kind of an assembly line where we can put entry level talents into a complex situation and have them succeed at solving the problem repeatedly and profitably without a bunch of callbacks.

And that's freaking hard.

And without what, you know, for at least from my experience out of the company without causing more harm to the house unknowingly, especially because we're starting to really modify some elements of the house, like humidity, just air quality, all the things that are, you know, not to mention efficiency and just like energy savings on somebody's electric bill.

But man, we're talking about you know, combustion appliances a lot of times too, if somebody's not completely electrifying.

There's so many elements we got to be really aware of.

Yep.

About half the houses we did rim joist jobs on, we made the natural draft water heaters fail combustion safety testing.

Afterwards, they wouldn't draft because their combustion air.

So now the easiest way for to get combustion air was down the flue.

It's not good.

It's supposed to be going up the flu.

It's the opposite effect.

Up is good.

Up is good when it comes to combustion air, especially in natural draft.

So, yeah, there's.

There's all of these challenges.

So laying out how to predict it.

And the thing is, you can never predict with 100 certainty.

Houses are crazy, complex interconnected systems.

So, like, there are plenty of times we do something like, oh, I didn't think about that.

But then there were like, you always want to offer extra stuff that people aren't taking, but you need to have decent understanding or a decent structure of things to offer, which we have within the HVAC 2.0 system like that.

But hardly any projects go that way anyway.

It's like one out of a thousand.

Not that many people want to pay what it takes to genuinely fix their house.

They just want their heating and cooling to work.

So that was.

That was the other thing that we had as we tread this path is we kept figuring out that if things didn't go the way we were hoping them to, and we.

We sold one of these nice projects with a bunch of shell retrofit, we still sold H Vac.

So, like, no matter what happens, a piece of H Vac came out of the system.

We're like, sure, we need to figure this out for H Vac contractors.

And so that began in 2017.

And here we are six years later, still trying to figure this crap out.

But we're.

We're right on the cusp.

Because the hard part was we did the opposite of what most people did.

So we started at the hard end.

We figured out a repeatable process for selling and executing complex retrofits that doesn't require an insane amount of technical knowledge.

Like, it still requires some.

Like, you're gonna have to learn.

Yeah.

But it's.

It.

You.

You don't have to go to a full doctorate.

Sure.

Yeah.

Like, as long as somebody's above a certain threshold of aptitude, then qualify, you can get there.

So we figured that out and then dialed it back to the.

The first half of that process, which is basically the first half of an energy audit.

And you're just trying to triage a house is all you're trying to do.

And so that, that if there's no shell but you, you take a blower door reading and you get their energy usage and you understand their thermostat set points.

Now you can size H Vac within half a ton easily.

Sure.

Where without knowing a few extra pieces of information, you can easily be off by a ton and quite frequently, particularly in colder climates, be off by two or even three.

So I mean you can be off by an entire piece of equipment.

That's kind of wild.

If you're talking 3 ton heat pump and you're off by 3 tons, you're off by an entire piece of equipment.

Right.

So you need that information.

So we started figuring out how to do the really hard stuff and then we got to the kind of the middle grade things where the house, maybe it needs shell work, but we can make lots of adjustment with H Vac alone.

And we figured that out.

But then the problem is how do we offer things to clients without coercion?

And if you only have the step up process, you're not going to offer it to everyone.

It's going to be, oh, you have a problem home and then you're going to sell it, you're not going to offer it, you're going to push.

So you want to pull, not push.

Sure.

I'm sure there's lots of pieces that you do that work the same way.

And so we needed a free quote process on the bottom end so you could put any replacement lead through it and your entry level talent could be successful at triaging them.

So the client actually triages themselves into either a free quote or comfort consult.

And the comfort consult you help them triage into.

Do we just do H Vac or do we need to do more planning in a full audit?

And like if you have a thousand leads, like one or ten is going to go for the advanced process, which is what we started out building.

And then it's not actually that useful in reality, which is kind of funny.

But it does hold the whole thing together because you can, you can have a newbie confidently walk into any home and know that they can fix whatever is wrong with that home.

And now we have a path to apply building science at scale.

I love it.

So a question I which I'm really curious about, which came first?

Right.

The chicken or the egg?

Were you an H Vac contractor first?

Were you home performance?

How did that work together and evolve on this path?

So that's where we got to go back to.

I needed a job.

Okay.

Where so many of our stories end up starting.

Like how many people get into H Vac by raw choice?

Not that many.

I needed a job.

I was an addict.

You needed a job.

My dad did it, my grandpa did it, my uncle did it, you know, whatever it is.

Or I needed a job and I'm okay with my hands.

Like, um, most people don't.

I mean it's, it's not like a fireman or a doctor.

When you're a little kid, you're not like, hey, can I be an H Vac guy?

So, yeah, I actually come from the insulation side.

So I worked for a fiberglass distributor in inside sales and I had worked for my dad before that and actually ran his companies poorly.

Don't.

Don't give a 23 year old full ran over two companies.

Like, because I had no idea what, what, like, it's like not having any understanding of, I don't know, overlanding or whatever, where you get to a fork in the road and you have no idea which one's better.

So you just constantly flipping a coin, which means you're going to choose wrong a lot.

And that's, that's what happened.

So that was, that was unpleasant.

We'll just put it that way.

So I needed a job and worked for fiberglass manufacturer.

Moved to outside sales after a little bit.

So our, the distribution company got bought and so I was going out talking to insulation contractors that insulated new homes for the most part.

Okay.

And this is 05 through 09.

So like, it's a heady time for selling material.

But then 08 came and in early 09, I lost my job and so did my wife.

But I was, I was ready to get out anyway because it felt like office space at that company.

I went from one of 17 to one of 17,000.

I had five bosses.

Somebody was always pissed at me and I'm like, you guys need to figure this stuff out.

I'll do whatever you want, but you guys need to talk and decide what you want me to focus on and then I'll focus on that.

You're not filling out the TPS reports right.

I know.

Yeah, you didn't do the COVID sheet.

Exactly.

That was totally how it felt.

Just I was so annoyed and I didn't like my bosses anymore.

And like it's a. I was doing the same job and I just didn't care anymore.

So I was, I was looking to get out anyway and I got ushered out the door.

As did many at that time.

And.

And so started an insulation company doing retrofit insulation.

Cause I needed a job.

And that was the point.

If you remember, it's like 500 resumes per position.

I'm like I'm not going to go that path.

Like it's going to take too long.

And I had already bought the a little cheap truck and a cheap machine so I could do stuff.

And I was doing attic overblows because I didn't really know that much.

Like I knew some.

I've always been a product knowledge person.

So I knew like air sealing kind of there.

But I was half assing it.

Like it hadn't been defined.

I didn't really know what it was.

I'd seal light fixtures and call that good.

That wasn't good.

And then I met an energy auditor who taught me more about how to do that sort of thing.

I took BPI training, Building Performance Institute.

Right.

Took building analyst training and learned more.

But that drove me nuts to an extent because they talk about the what, they don't talk about the why and they often don't talk about the how either.

Exactly.

And you need all of those to really understand what you need to do next.

And so I, the, the insulation company, I got to where classic contracting error.

I was doing better work than I was charging for and that I knew how to solve it.

And my margins went bloop.

Absolutely well because you start doing more work as you know, but you just don't charge more for yourself.

Oh, I wasn't.

I'm here, I gotta do this too.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's, it was, it was a bad value building problem.

And so around that time I was playing around on LinkedIn back when LinkedIn discussions were really good.

Sure.

And there's a BPI Resnet group and met my business partner and I remember the first matches.

Dude, you're making really good points but you need to calm down.

Yeah.

Really excited about this stuff.

Well he was pissed off because he had figured out how to sell energy audits.

And in Sandler, it's a monkey's paw in the Sandler sales system.

So you, you sell somebody something of small dollar value and now you flip from a salesperson to a consultant and now they're much more likely to listen to where you are and your closing ratio goes way, way up.

So he was getting to 50, 60, 70% closing ratios.

And at the time his average ticket was 16, 8.

And this was like 2010.

So I mean that was a big ticket with an H vac.

I mean a full system was still like 8 grand.

Like even a decent system was 8 grand.

Now good luck getting anything for a grand.

And I'm like, what are you doing?

And he started teaching me a different process and how to do the full energy audits and the other pieces.

And we started working through that and then we're like, man, this, this needs to exist at larger scale because the few projects a year we can do 10 or 20 projects a year.

And I'm one of, I don't know, 50 people in the country that have this kind of capability.

Not going to change anything.

It's a.

If I remember my numbers right from Jim Bergman and Measure quick, over 90% of residential H VAC systems have a detectable fault, which means the install is not right or something's broken after the fact.

But I also got static pressure testing numbers from him.

70% of systems are over half an inch, which is technically out of spec for the vast majority of equipment out there.

And 47% are over 0.7, which with an ECM is where your early failure risk begins.

Like you're probably going to eat that motor before end of life for the equipment and that might break other things.

Oh, you know, and even worse in the last decade what happened was with all of the modulating equipment and variable speed and communicating, all these companies are now slapping those in and the way that the TMS are promoting it from the brand is, hey, you don't have to worry as much about your ductwork and static pressure because these things are just going to self adjust.

So don't worry about it.

And that's the messaging coming from manufacturers and it just complicates the problem.

So I, man, we're on the same page.

There's.

There are so many things that like now we have these systems, okay, I, I view like PSC motors like a big lineman, you get some 300 pound musc muscular dude running down the the line and another 300 pound muscular dude jumps on his back trying to tackle him.

But he doesn't fall down.

If he just keeps running like he SL down but he doesn't stop, that's a PSC motor.

They just honey badger doesn't give a.

That's kind of where it is.

You could do anything to them and.

Like it was really hard to make them fail early.

Well and then also you're so with that same analogy, your ductwork is now all of the cheerleaders on the sideline that is getting bowled over by them.

Obliterating everything and Blowing it apart.

I mean, I can't tell you the number of systems I've walked into that other companies have installed that type of equipment.

Didn't do anything to duct work.

And literally every the planet metal duct work is ripped apart.

Blasting, you know, it's just insane.

I love turning the fan on it.

At oil cans.

You hear bump, bump, and you're like, I'm gonna go get my drill.

It's time to test some static pressure.

Right.

But now we have ECMs, which are much more like a prima donna soccer player, where you touch them on the shoulder and they fall over, writhing in pain.

Oh, I'm gonna die.

Like, they're super sen. And like, we like old R22 systems or even R12 before that, we had thick metal and pretty low pressures, like 75 to 100 psi.

And now we're running like 250 and up with thinner metal.

So, like, everything about the systems, largely thanks to efficiency standards, is getting trickier to manage.

And then also, in pushing for higher sear, we're hurting sensible heat ratios.

So we're doing less dehumidification.

Right.

As dew points are going up.

Like dew points in Cleveland, where I'm from, are up about 5 degrees within my lifetime.

That's significant.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Like, whole house fans don't work anymore.

Where you got a fan, you know, in the.

The ceiling of.

Yeah.

Attic fans.

Yeah.

And you blow it into the attic and you open the windows, and once the night air starts cooling down, you can just do that.

But if your dew point outside is 70 degrees just made the house wet.

Yeah.

And like, particularly if you close the windows the next day and turn the air conditioner on.

The air conditioner.

Well, A, now it doesn't have as much latent capacity, but B, it couldn't really deal with it before anyway because you just brought in, like, gallons of moisture that have to be very expensively removed.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So there's all of these things that.

That stack up.

Like, we can't keep doing things the way that we've been doing them.

Like, we're going to get so many warranty callbacks.

And, like, we're hearing a 5 and 10% furnace fan failures from the ECM switch in 19.

So these fans are three years old, and we're already seeing 5 or 10% failure, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So tell me a little bit then, because that's a thank you.

Great segue into what exactly is H Vac 2.0?

Because we've kind of danced around it a little bit to give Us the nuts and bolts of what that program actually is and how it.

Because the whole point of this is making it to scale.

How does that, how does that do that for us?

Yep.

So one of the easiest analogies to begin with is think about taking a little kid bowling.

You don't just let them bowl because they're going to gutterball all 20 shots.

Like they're just not going to hit anything.

So you pull the bumpers up for them and now they're going to hit something.

They may not do great, but you know, they've maybe they'll get to 50 if they're good, maybe 100.

Sure.

And with the building science pieces and also sales process pieces, like we, we have to define a path and keep people on it.

So what 2.0 looks like from the outside is software as a service.

So it's a frankly kind of ugly looking program because we were focusing on, let's make it work first and then we'll make it pretty.

But just automates putting people through the process and helps keep you in the steps that you need to be in.

Because we talked the other day, like sales process.

If you jump steps, you get out of your compartment, you're going to lose the sale.

Like almost for sure.

Or you're going to set expectations wrong and the client's going to get pissed and then you're going to have either a bad review or a bunch of callbacks or like it's, it's going to be unpleasant regardless.

Sure.

So things need to be in the right order.

This helps keep you in that.

Okay.

And so there's, there's a couple different pieces of it, but fundamentally they deal with two questions.

The first one is does the client have comfort problems to solve?

And we put them through a four question quiz.

Basically the rooms don't heat.

Well, the rooms don't cool well.

Does anybody have respiratory issues, allergies, are asthma and are there moisture or pest problems in the house?

Those will sound very familiar from a home performance perspective.

It's basically the.

It sounds a lot like the questionnaire that I give out for free of my Facebook group.

Yeah, exactly.

Like these are.

These are not exotic questions, but we have people answer them on a scale of 0 to 10.

And if their scores are low, they do a free quote.

And if their scores are high, we recommend a comfort consult.

They don't have to, but they can.

But the free quote then has a script and it's so.

And there's.

We've got a button where you can click and you can pop up hints, okay.

So that you can send somebody brand spanking new out there even with zero training.

Just be like, follow this and read.

And they're going to look like an idiot because they're going to be like, hang on, you know, awkward silence while they're reading what they need to be doing.

So ideally they do a few ride alongs, but it's going to be enough to help keep them on path.

Right.

And what we're trying to do in doing this is a combination of educating the client because most people don't understand that there's different pieces of H Vac and like different things.

Like whenever you learn about a new product, you assume that it's a commodity.

Sure.

Very few products are truly commodities.

There's different levels and the different levels have different capabilities, you know, whatever product you're looking at.

So we help them understand that and then we help them understand static pressure.

Or we call it duct pressure.

The client's total external static pressure.

Like.

Yeah, it's like telling a joke and having to explain the punchline.

You ruined it, dude.

Well, of course, yeah.

If we vomit technical, the confused mind says no.

So yeah, how can we make it, every bit of it into lay terms for the homeowner?

Yep.

So I, I made five and a half minutes worth of video on what we call the six functions of H vac, which is load matching, filtration, fresh air, dehumidification, humidification and mixing.

Those are the six.

And explain to them that their car does five of these in four minutes.

But then we don't explain in that short video because it's four freaking minutes.

You know how hard it is to get that much content down to four minutes?

That was months of work to get it down to four minutes.

And so we don't show them what the solutions are, but the free quote includes the solutions.

And so the products that you offer are queued to those sorts of things.

Okay.

So, and then the free quote process also has a really nice measurement tool where you can put in all the data from the existing equipment and then you can take your measurements of the ductwork and so forth so the install manager doesn't have to pull his hair out.

I'm trying to figure out, you know, what, what do we have to order to get it in there?

So the, the free quote that's just about to launch, it's been there forever.

It's felt like the Money pit.

So once the house could be done.

Two weeks.

I've been at two weeks for like three months.

But we're.

We're genuinely close.

It might actually finally be two weeks.

I feel like Elon Musk.

He'll be here by the end of the year.

No.

Yeah.

Which year, though, right?

Yeah, exactly which decade?

This is really close, but the free quote process does a good job of offering clients different options and automatically helping them understand what they're getting and what they're not getting.

So that if the client chooses bad equipment, it's like, look, you bought the equipment that was all frowny faces.

It sucks at all six functions.

So you're like, well, it doesn't dehumidify.

The comfort sucks.

It's too loud.

It turns on and off, and it only runs for a little bit.

And like.

So would you like me to come out, do the comfort consultants?

Would you like to discuss replacing the equipment?

You don't have to go out there.

It's not.

Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry.

And what are you going to do on single stage equipment?

Play with the airflow, play with the charge.

That's all you got.

That's about it.

There's not much you can play with on those.

So the free quote process, that's the part that I'm really excited about because that also makes it so that after the four questions, you have a good process for people.

For the free quote side, the comfort consult, that process has been solid for years.

This point.

And then the comfort consult, like, that involves a blower door.

But the blower door, as we can both agree, it's part sales tool and part diagnostics.

And I pegged it about half and half for this visit.

And yeah, once you get your baseline measurement there, the.

The rest is a dog and pony show.

Yeah, oftentimes.

Although the.

The other nice thing is running zonal pressures is good where you check any room that has a door on it for how connected to the outside.

So at least you have an idea of, like, if little Johnny's room won't heat, and little Johnny's room is basically outside when you.

You test it by pressure.

Like, we can't H vac that problem away.

Sure.

Like, we're gonna have to get two or three more duct runs or we can deal with the shell.

Those are your options.

Well, and I mean, I do have to say I've done, you know, a few hundred blower door tests in my.

In my career, and there have been some times when there's been a surprise to me.

You go around the house with your IR camera and it's 105 outside, or it's, you know, 28 degrees outside.

And all of a sudden this room that you didn't expect is completely destroyed by the blower door.

And you're like, wait a minute, something else is going on here.

We've got to figure this out.

Let's dive deeper.

Yeah, exactly.

It's definitely a valid tool, but until.

You do that, like load calcs are kind of crazy.

We consistently find that Man J is double reality for heat load cooling.

It's close enough.

Like maybe it's off by a ton, which that's something.

But it's not off by three, which is usually what we see on the heat.

Especially with the advent like we were talking about earlier.

One of the benefits of having multi stage equipment or modulating equipment is, I mean truly when they first came out, we toured the factory and they're like, we only make two sizes.

Just the circuit board tells it if it wants to be a five ton or a four ton.

Yeah.

Or a three ton or a two ton.

Yep.

But that we all, they, they truly are only two designs.

Yep.

So that does solve a little bit with, especially with cooling, you know, or a heat pump, which will take us into an electrified conversation.

Yeah, that's a good place to go too.

But just to finish answering your question, fundamentally it's a piece of software that I, I don't really want it to be software, but it kind of had to be like that was the only way to do this to, to help put those bumpers up for people.

Because if we're going to scale, we need to be able to send entry level people out and have them succeed and then not cost you a ton of money.

Sure.

If they screw up the sales like just one company we work with, they have four ton mic.

If you have a thousand square foot house, you get a 4 ton AC and 100k furnace.

You got a 5,000 square foot house, you get a 4 ton AC and a 100k furnace.

Like this dude doesn't know how to sell anything else and he's gotten good.

Like he's selling oftentimes these things with freaking green speeds.

But you put a 4 ton green speed on 2 tons of ductwork, that's a really unhappy piece of equipment.

Yeah.

So like this company has a huge number of systems that come back because carrier tells you on an Infinity thermostat, you get a listing of the systems that are above 1.1 and those are.

Their static pressure on board is pretty accurate.

It's within about 0.05.

So it's close enough for government work.

And they're getting all of these systems that are like, over 1.1, they're going to eat their ECM.

They're probably going to slug the compressor.

You know, there's all these things.

It'll just shut down.

Yeah.

And it's like, why?

Like, what are we doing?

I used to, the way I trained this with my system, I'll train people.

It's like, listen, when you're talking to homeowners, say, look, the box, the hole is this big.

If you, you know, that's 12 by 12 or whatever your numbers are, just because you put a bigger engine on it, you're getting 2 tons worth of cooling.

Now it's just working harder to do it.

You can't just make the system bigger without increasing the airflow to match.

And so that's how you talk to homeowners.

Listen, it's a three ton.

Now, you.

You can't beg me for a four or five ton.

If we don't do the rest, it's.

It's got to be correct.

Yep.

That's where showing them the.

The duct pressure measurements can be helpful.

And by the way, we.

We suggest.

Offer that cheap because you're there for a free quote.

Sure.

So offer them testing for 25 or 50 bucks.

Absolutely.

And now you're flipping from a salesperson to a consultant in their mind.

Or like, one of my favorite scenes, I tell the story all the time is from Breaking Bad when Better Call Saul shows up and they just have a bad cook and they're about to shoot him.

You know, they're all mad at each other.

Everything's going to hell.

The lawyer shows up and he.

He looks shady, because he is.

And the.

They're yelling at him.

They're, like, starting to point a gun at him, and he's like, wait, wait, wait.

Put a dollar in my pocket.

Why?

He at least stops them dead for a moment.

It's like, we want to slow people down, put speed bumps in so that they slow down enough to think.

Yeah, pattern interrupt.

Exactly.

And he's like, you want client attorney privilege, Right?

I need a retainer.

Put a dollar in my pocket.

And they both do.

And all of a sudden, he's their lawyer, and they calm down and he can regain control and help them understand what's going on.

And like, that's the same sort of thing.

If you're at a free quote and you can get any amount of money to change hands, it flips the relationship.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

If you.

All the listeners, if you don't hear anything else from this Podcast today.

That is a million dollar idea concept and golden nugget right there.

It will literally make you millions of dollars by that one idea.

So pause, make a note.

Yeah.

And built in software.

So if I'm hearing you right.

So back to the software question.

If I'm hearing you right, the H Vac, H Vac 2.0, it's software, but it's, it's an education platform along with a systematized plan for somebody to be able to take it into the field and use it real time with homeowners to do the job and be the.

Just a system to follow as well.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Because I come from manufacturing and, and within any, any kind of company, processes are king.

If you don't have a process, you're going to have fires.

You just don't.

You need standard operating procedures.

So this helps put a natural process on H vac sales.

Which is funny because like I said, I come from the shell side.

My, my expertise is on the shell side.

I'm getting close to finally like six years later, launching an air sealing course.

Because people don't understand like air sealing.

So you get like this insanely complex like Green Building Advisor.

People are snipping over tiny little things like, well, what about this?

Oh, it's the perm rating of this is 2.3 and this one's 2.5.

Which one do I use?

Just pick one.

Yeah, like, damn it, somebody go do something.

It's all better than what it is now.

Right.

And so everybody argues over theory and specification sheets.

Nobody's out there actually doing the work and figuring out what the hell works or if it doesn't.

And so the air sealing course I'm about to launch, because shells where I come from is super pragmatic.

Here's the theory, here's the tools, here's what the assemblies look like in theory.

Here's what an assembly looks like in a photo.

Here's what we did to do it, here's how it worked.

Sure.

And it doesn't have to be that hard.

Right.

But it gets over complicated.

And when it gets over complicated, like you said, the confused mind says no.

And then it doesn't scale and.

Yep, absolutely.

Because systems.

So tell me that's a.

You couldn't have said in set these segues up better.

So you keep saying to scale.

Tell me the driver behind why you're so passionate about scaling this to make a difference on a grander scale on the bigger platform.

So there's multiple reasons.

I mean, we can get into the Electrification front.

But there's also just a huge public health piece to this.

I went to the Dry Climate forum, which is like, I'm nerdy.

These guys are nerdy cubed.

Like I can't even keep up with these guys.

So I view them like NASA and I'm like, cool.

I want to figure out Velcro and a microwave and sell those.

But thank you for figuring out the technology so that we can do the next piece.

Exactly.

All right, we've got WD40 now.

Good job.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank you, guys.

Now to get out there and get the stuff on shelves.

So, like we're seeing humidity increase across the country that's going to cause a bunch of public health issues.

But at the Dry Climate forum in 2015, I learned there was a study that causally linked childhood asthma to damp buildings.

Oh, wow.

So I mean, you think about in the Midwest you have an older damp building, it's a low income family, you know, maybe it's an older up and down rental, their air quality is horrible.

But this, this is true all over.

So we're having public health impacts with this.

And so how can we give people healthy and comfortable places to live at scale?

But then the other piece ends up being the energy transition.

Sure.

Which to be clear, I am, I'm a bad tree hugger.

So I'm not really a tree hugger at all.

So politically I lean a little.

Right, sure.

So I don't.

Yeah.

This is a polarizing conversation.

And I'm with you.

I'm very much.

When.

Anytime I bring this up.

So just strictly for the listeners, this conversation, yes, is extremely politically polarizing.

But for the way that I believe about it and knowing you in a couple days, this is a science conversation.

If you decide to apply politics to it, that's your own fault, basically as a listener.

But I mean, the science is there, the research is there.

That's how I feel about it personally.

Yeah.

Well.

And so the way that I oftentimes frame it is this is a green conversation, but it's not a green conservation environmentalist conversation.

It's a green, renewable energy is now the cheapest form of energy that mankind has known.

Let me check.

Ever.

And that just happened in the last two years.

It's been predictable, it's been coming down.

But like solar, wind and batteries are down 70 to 90% since 2010.

That's significant.

So that's enough to tip things where things make sense.

Now we have other challenges.

The utilities are morons.

They probably need new structures.

Like there's A bunch of challenges there, but just because.

Yeah, it's the last regulated monopoly that there is.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's a, let's see, a privately owned, government sponsored monopoly.

What could go wrong?

Oh, geez.

Yeah.

Imagine that.

This is not capitalism.

Like it's.

I'm not an absolute believer in capitalism, but like as a system it's good.

It needs rails to some degree or things go sideways, but that is not it.

So, yeah, there's all kinds of crazy stuff happening.

Oh, absolutely.

But especially, I mean, for me here in Texas, it's even worse because of Texas own electric grid and we won't even get started in the fall of the money on, you know, what happens when storms happen here.

That's a whole nother conversation that does get into the political conversation that we don't want to for this episode.

Yeah, yeah, we'll avoid that.

Well, although I just saw this morning a friend of mine, Josh Rhodes, who while he's there in town, he's at UT Austin and he said that renewables have saved Texas ratepayers 11 billion.

I forget the exact time frame, but it was like the last couple of years, but it worked out to 430 bucks a year per household.

Right.

Like that's real money.

That is.

Yeah, that's, that's.

Yeah.

So that, that sort of thing is coming.

So this is coming and it doesn't.

Like you can make it political and actually the curse is the electrify everything, folks.

Like, I'm having to back away fast, which drives me nuts because like, this is just a logical conclusion to me.

Like, this is where we're going, folks.

And then it's getting all kinds of political stuff applied to it and like we're going to take your gas stoves away.

Oh, don't say that.

Like, come on.

That's like, no, we're not.

Nobody's losing their gas stove if you have a gas stove.

Come on.

Don't even say something that sounds like you might be taking guns away.

Like, exactly.

Like you're just going to polarize and you're going to lose half your audience.

Like, this is.

Why are we doing this?

So this is where we're going.

And like there's a bunch of different reasons.

So back to the public health piece.

If the biggest reason that our air quality sucks is we're burning stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, look at the pandemic in LA when everything stopped.

They got blue skies.

They haven't had blue skies in forever.

Oh, no.

Good.

Yeah.

There was a town on the Edge of India, looking into Pakistan and the mountains.

They saw the mountains for the first time in 40 years.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, so air quality is a big thing and it like that particulate matter, the dust in the air is really, really hard on us.

So getting rid of that stuff is a good thing.

But we can also achieve true energy independence because right now, like a huge chunk of the reason we have a big military is we have to protect the flow of oil, of course, around the world.

So if, if we can take a lot of that off the table.

Like, there's lots of conservative talking points, there's lots of liberal talking points, but it's just logical and it's coming.

It's only a matter of speed.

Right.

But the, the speed thing.

Well, Monday actually, so it'll be.

Probably be after you, you publish this, but we're about to do an episode of the H Vac 2.0 show on the IRA.

Okay.

Because it is really challenging.

It's not that you can't work with it, but I, I don't know how.

Break that down a little bit for listeners that don't.

Don't know what that acronym is.

Oh sure, that's the Inflation Reduction Act.

Okay.

Which it.

Actually, we can thank my senator here.

So Joe Manchin, who is both loved and hated at different times, the, the build back better thing was going to be really expensive.

So I think he saved us like 4 or 5 trillion.

And it was one guy saying, no, I'm not going to do it.

But he's like, but his energy stuff, if we can balance everything to where we can increase taxes.

In this case it was like corporate stuff.

And then spend the money on moving to clean energy.

I'm cool with that.

Give me a list of stuff.

And they did.

So there's a bunch of things that are in there that are great, but the stuff that affects us I couldn't dislike much more, to be frank.

And I'm a huge electrification.

There's pieces and parts of it that are, that are both good and bad.

Right.

So yeah.

So yeah.

So let's quickly buzz through.

I'm glad that you actually brought this up because you know, one of the electrify things and, and as everybody knows the way we introduce this, we are now solar and H VAC sales training.

Meaning I am for the last two and a half years, I actually paused this podcast in this and the HREX sales training to deep dive into learning the ins and outs of solar and how to bring that back and apply it to the H VAC world because, you know, there's a lot of people out there that would argue that solar and roofing is the peanut butter and jelly.

But I am a firm believer, and I think you are too, that it makes much more sense to marry with the H vac industry and with the.

With homes instead of that.

Yes, that's a great piece.

Just because they're already there.

But we're talking about energy, we're talking about electrification.

We're already dealing with that.

And so the parts of the Inflation Reduction act that were actually good for that industry was the raising the tax credit back up to 30% and extending it for 10 years when it was about to go away completely.

So that was the good.

That was part of the good part.

Batteries and batteries.

Yep, yep.

Absolutely.

We've got the.

The battery component in there as well, which is really fantastic.

And as I'm sure you'll agree, in the next probably two to five years, as costs of batteries come down and technology increases that bridge to.

Because right now only about 10% of solar projects get a storage attachment to them.

Yeah.

So we're going to see that dramatically increase, especially with what just happened with NIM3 in California with, you know, things that are happening so many, so much more storage is going to become a regular feature.

But so take us through a little bit of the negative parts of it as well, and then we can kind of circle out of that a little bit.

Or electrification or both.

Yeah, both, actually.

Okay.

And then we'll circle back and end.

It on a positive note and do the positive.

Yeah.

So on electrification, your negatives are.

You can get really high bills in the middle of winter.

Like if, if you don't understand what your loads are in particularly colder climates, like, your climate may not be that big of a deal because you don't spend that many hours, you know, below, say, 40.

Sure, yeah.

Just.

Just a handful of certain parts of the state.

Yeah.

So it's not a huge deal, but.

Beyond that, not as much.

Yeah.

So it.

And I mean, we've already seen like the Southeast is huge on heat pumps already because the climate is okay for it and they've got inexpensive power.

So that's quite normal there.

But up north you have to be careful on that.

Now, one of my biggest worries about this is as we size to heating rather than cooling load.

I mean, in general, your heat load is 50 to 150% higher.

So like your.

Your heat load is one and a half to two and a half times your cooling load in general.

Right.

This is larger Deltas, even in a mild climate like Austin.

So when we start sizing to heat load and we're already moving to higher sheer equipment that sucks at dehumidification, we're going to have a bunch of additional challenges on the dehumidification front, which could lead to some really unhappy clients, some sick clients, and we can rot houses out.

And the curse of moisture problems is it's.

It's not like, oh, you install the system in the next week, there's some alarm that goes off somewhere, there's a problem.

No, it's.

It festers in the wall, and 10 years later, you've got to pull a wall down and rebuild things because it rotted.

So moisture control.

I'm really, really nervous.

And consumer experience.

I'm really, really nervous from just a plain old electrification front.

And that's part of what we built into our system, that we help you reduce those risks and.

And responsibly avoid responsibility by teaching homeowners, here's your risk.

Are you comfortable with this?

And they sign off on it.

Who owns it when they sign off that they understand risk?

The homeowner.

They do.

Where most of the time in sales, the salesperson ends up owning too much.

Right.

The last person that touches it is the one that owns it.

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

That sucks.

I've certainly had that happen in my contracting days on the other side of the house.

Like, we weren't even there.

Come on.

Water heaters go out.

That just happened to be the same day.

We were 100 yards from them on the other side of the house.

Oh, well, who did this?

Yeah, the finger pointing is annoying.

So we really help reduce finger pointing.

But on the IRA front, we have a couple of problems.

So there's a lot of politicization, namely from rewiring America.

So they've got this calculator that shows people how much money they're going to get.

And when you put incentives up first, people's greed buttons get pushed.

What is the cheapest way that I can get that?

Free money.

Right.

And the cheapest equipment is usually a mini split, a basic mini split married to an American air handler that can't dehumidify for squat.

Like, we're seeing sensible heat ratios, hate ratios.

That's funny, actually.

That's hate ratios.

That's a perfect, perfect slip.

I love it.

Yeah.

Like, ooh, that's.

That is where my mind is.

But we see sensible heat ratios in the 0.9 to 1 range, which means it's doing 0 to 10% dehumidification.

Most homes need 20 to 30 to balance them when there's cooling mode.

And so we're getting miseducated clients that typically their only motivation is climate.

So they're cheap because they don't have any other pain they're trying to solve.

They want the cheapest possible way to get off fossil fuels.

But they're going to end up.

So now they are.

They're too budget conscious.

So their expectations are high, but their budget's low.

What happens with those clients?

They're always the most dissatisfied homeowners.

You're going to get a bad review, they're going to be pissed off.

You're going to have a bunch of callbacks and you're not going to make any money on the job to begin with and then you're going to lose money over time.

Do you want those clients?

Absolutely not.

I don't.

And guess what?

We're winding up right now.

So like if somebody comes to you and they mention IRA or rewiring, ask some questions and think hard on if that is your client or not.

Absolutely.

The way that I and you see if you agree with this or not because I know we haven't talked about sell specific stuff but the way that I always coach to the way to ask those kind of questions for that specific homeowner, especially if they're a commodity buyer, somebody starts asking about pricing that kind of thing is the clarification questions of okay, are you, are you after a good value for your dollar or are you just after the low down rock bottom down and dirty scrape the bottom of the barrel, cheapest price.

I love how many adjectives you put.

On there and if you phrase it like that they're either you're going to find your 10% of people that are the commodity buyer that do just want the cheapest price and those are the ones you walk away from if they say no, no, no, that's not what I really want.

I just want to make sure that I'm getting a good value for my, for my dollar.

Okay, great.

We can work with that.

I can show you how this is the best value for your investment and that's, that instantly separates those buyers.

So that's the way I coach it.

I don't know if you do this a similar thing or not similar but.

I, I have to.

I like that line how, how long that is down a dirty rock bottom.

Scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Pricing.

The exactly what you're describing.

Right?

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a critical point.

I ideally you're building value as you go and pushing things up.

But the, the people that are going to come and ask about IRA to begin with, we probably don't want to work with, which sucks because I pulled my first gas meter in 2014.

We've been doing this since way before it was cool.

Nobody even knew what it was.

I own electrify everything.net because I saw it coming and I pushed hard against the policy that ended up going through and it actually helped counter propose an idea that became a bill.

There's actually a Senate bill and there's actually another one that we're working on now coming back through.

I can't say much more than that yet.

But the idea is rather than incentivizing pieces of like specific performances and so forth that end up affecting your.

So this is the other bad part.

It affects your sales process.

It brings price and equity equipment selection to the beginning of the process.

Right.

That is an end of the process thing.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

What are you trying to figure out?

Like what are your.

The things you want to solve?

What does the House need?

What's the current system?

What's the budget that you have to play with?

And then that basically determines what their options are when you understand those pieces.

But if you start with this I, I joke.

It's like going into a singles bar and every single lady has her dad sitting next to her and you have to buy him a drink too.

Oh God, that's.

That's a hell scenario.

I know, right?

You're just like so.

And, and this is what consumer facing, or it's called downstream incentives create.

I have yet to see a downstream incentive that actually helps the market and drive scale.

It adds friction every time to the transaction.

Absolutely.

You know, and I can attest to that working in.

I was the sales manager and sales trainer for a big carrier dealer here in Austin for, for several years.

And we were really deeply involved with the Austin Energy Home performance program, which is incentive driven.

So the, every single call that came in there.

So yes, we were trying to do things the right way, but also you've got all of these deadbeats that are strictly super quick in and out and they're going to be cheaper.

Strictly trying to get the homeowner those rebates because then they got to pocket a bunch of it and it's like all your.

And on top of that.

So kind of on the bigger scale we're talking about with the, the bill is that actually incentivizes these manufacturers, the, the low budget manufacturers to come in and create equipment specifically designed to fit that low dollar item.

Just because, oh, we could sell more boxes this way with zero care in the world about quality or longevity or anything else.

So it just feeds the cycle even more.

Yeah, exactly.

It's, I, I, we have looked for a decade, so, so we're big thinkers on a bunch of fronts.

And so we've looked for a decade on downstream incentives.

Is there anything that we think is genuinely helpful?

The answer is not just no, but hell no, it doesn't exist.

We don't think it exists.

It's a bad structure.

So I actually talked to the person who put this into place, one of these programs, and I talked to someone who put one of the IRA programs in place and they asked me, so Blue sky, you could do anything.

Magic wand, what would you do to change this?

And I said delete it.

Because the structure is fundamentally bad.

You're like asking me, so we're building this building, it's a skyscraper, but it has a bad foundation.

What do we do to fix it?

Change the foundation or tear the building down.

Those are the options.

It's a bad structure.

You can't fix it.

Yeah.

And collapse otherwise.

Yeah.

So that's, that's basically where I am with the ira, which sucks.

Like I'm a big electrification fan.

It's, it's the logical thing.

It's where we're going.

You can provide much more comfortable and healthy homes to people.

Like if you want good load matching, where you have equipment that turns down further than anything else, it can't be a furnace.

A 60k mod furnace turns down to maybe 20,000 BTUs.

Right.

Two and three ton heat pumps will turn down to six or nine.

Right.

And like when you run the loads in Cleveland, I was surprised you need like 10,000 BTU's covers.

It was something like that was like two thirds of the year.

20,000 BTUs covers 95%.

Right.

This was assuming like a house with a three ton load.

But we, we consistently find when you, when you learn how to do loads that are based on reality, most houses 2,000 square feet and under.

You can get to a three ton heat load in Cleveland and we're putting in 60, 80 and 100,000 BTU furnaces.

It's just totally the wrong piece of equipment.

Horrible overkill.

Yeah.

So if you want comfort, like you can do a hybrid.

I'm fine with hybrids.

Stack a variable speed heat pump on top of a furnace.

Pick your poison for what you want to put underneath.

You can use Resistance heat or propane or gas or whatever.

Right, right.

Whatever your backup is.

But if you want to deliver better comfort for your clients and better dehumidification, you need a communicating, variable speed piece of equipment.

There.

There is no other way to get there, period.

Absolutely.

100 agree.

And so if the, the whole goal that we've been doing is how do we provide really good experiences for both contractors and homeowners?

And doing that simultaneously is hard.

You can screw one party or the other and that's not that hard.

But doing both at the same time is really difficult.

So heat pumps are just the better way.

Even like it's fine if it's a hybrid like you, you lose some other dehumidification capabilities.

But like a hybrid, still pretty good.

So that, that can be the good side of electrification.

You can have really high client satisfaction.

There's all kinds of good things that, like if you want to provide a healthy, comfortable home, it pretty much has to involve a variable speed heat pump.

Right, Right.

So that part's good.

And then the power is going to get cheaper in time.

When we figure out what the hell's going on with utilities, that's going to be a tricky decade, to be frank.

Right.

But we may really peek out the top before that happens to them.

So we'll see.

Right, yeah.

And it depends where you are too.

So another stepping way back.

Sorry to go so far back, but I think that's fine.

Understand the southern grids are winter peaking.

So where you are the highest loads are now in the winter.

And it's oftentimes because you've got some heat pumps hitting resistance.

Right.

The northern grids generally have between 30 and 50% headroom for the winter because they're sized for cooling when all the air conditioners are humming.

So we have five or 10 years of full on electrification we can do before we use up all that headroom.

Now it's, it's more complicated than that.

You know, there's going to be all sorts of local issues and so forth, but in general, the grid in the north has a lot of room to grow.

So if you hear people like, oh, it's going to break the grid.

No, it's not.

We got like the conversation of they want us all to drive electric cars, but they can't even handle it right now.

Yeah, yeah, those are the challenges.

But I mean that's, that crap happens regardless.

Like it, you get a, a really hot day in, you know, the Cleveland area or wherever and the grid is stressed and they're like, hey, can you please turn your thermostat down or up like they're.

That's you.

You're going to push the limits of the machine no matter what, because we're building to that peak day.

Right.

But anyway, that we have lots of room there, so I'm not particularly worried.

Are there pieces?

Yeah, yeah.

But not in general.

So, you know, quick, pop out with.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, go ahead with that messaging too.

Which is really fun from, you know, strictly the sales perspective.

You know, when you, when you're talking to homeowners and it's just basically, hey, remember how they said when it's the hottest, they want you to turn your thermostat up?

Would you.

Do you.

Do you want to have to do that and sweat when it's the hottest part of the day?

Okay, great.

If I could show you how we could reduce the amount of electricity you use so you could keep it the same temperature and.

Or even just be giving back right then and completely help the load on the grid.

Yeah.

And then you could keep the temperature whatever you want at that time of the day.

Would you be open to that conversation?

So that's.

That is an easy entrance right into a home performance conversation.

Better equipment, adding solar or the total package, which is reduced before you produce so you don't even have to have as big of a solar system because now you're more efficient home size for that.

And then you're able to like, hey, I keep my thermostat wherever I want and I'm adding back to the grid in the peak times.

So they're not.

I'm not the problem, I'm helping the problem.

Yeah, there's that side.

The other side is who are we working for, the grid or the.

The customer.

Exactly.

So that the, the grid at the end of the day is a not my circus, not my monkeys problem.

Right.

But my goal is to help.

Help people stay comfortable and cheap to do it.

Exactly.

And that's where I'm really looking forward to batteries getting reasonable.

Because batteries can.

Can clip your peaks a lot, which is really useful.

And then you can store it like the power goes out and you've got a couple of hours or a couple of days, depending on what's going on and the size of the battery.

And you can also, you can plug in if you want some backup.

You don't need a five or $10,000 generator.

You can buy a $1,500 generator.

And because it only has to top the batteries up, it's not trying to Meet the instantaneous load.

That'll be fine.

So you.

Oh, it's great.

Yeah.

You know, 20 gallons of gas and a small generator and you can keep running for a long time.

So there's all of these pieces.

So that I'm really curious that we have just been trying to solve the.

The H Vac and to some degree, the building performance side.

But I am really looking forward to touching the solar and batteries because.

Right.

Like you were saying, like, it seems like it makes sense for roofing and it kind of does.

Like, there's going to be different verticals that are going to do this.

Of course.

Yeah.

The.

The roofing companies are going to do this too, but the roofing companies aren't getting into the electric side of things.

No.

If you're going to electrify a house, particularly if you need to upsize the panel, you need an electrician there.

Anyway, it's not that much more work at the end of the day to add solar at that point.

Right, absolutely.

You're already 100.

So I think that's going to be it.

So, like, like we were saying before the show, for years, the home performance side of things has been the H vac industries thing to lose.

We're trying to give it to them.

Right.

But also, like, just sell better equipment.

Like, we're a really important thing that we probably should have talked about sooner.

We are consistently seeing double the top line.

So double the sales with the same leads.

And it's a combination of two things.

It's higher close ratios, which I'm sure you talk about ad nauseam.

So, like, those two.

Those are the metrics, right?

Yeah, those are your levers.

If you can pull both those levers, good things happen.

And I mean, you can kind of choose whatever system you want.

And you should see something along those lines.

What we've been trying to do, though, is build in both the building performance side and the newbie, the entry level side.

Right, right.

Putting those two into the mix is like, holy crap.

Like, why is it taking so long?

Because nobody's done it before.

Because it sucks.

Yeah, exactly.

Hard to figure out.

Oh, it is, it is.

You know, and once you have a really good.

A lot of it has.

At the end of the day, it's.

Yes.

There's the technical side of figuring it out, but if we're one to scale it, the house doesn't write the check, the people write the check.

So it all comes down to communication of, you know, finding out there's two parts to a cell.

Right.

It's 50 of it is finding out what someone wants to accomplish and what their problems are.

Why do they want to buy.

Yeah.

The other 50, total 50% is finding out why they're not buying.

What is the fear, uncertainty and doubt that's keeping them from buying whatever you're offering.

And so helping, just like you're saying, helping them, you turning yourself into the consultant and now you're working together with them to design their own project and they can clear if you can communicate it clearly.

So they're involved and they can see, see that.

And a lot of us through leading questions.

It's like, Nate, can you see how this is causing your problem?

Yes.

Nate, can you see how by doing X, Y and Z, it's going to solve your problem so you never have to deal with that again?

Yep.

Great.

Would you like me to put that on your list to, to go ahead and accomplish that for you?

Yes.

There's Dr. Energy Saver popping out right there.

You got it.

Yeah.

The accomplished list.

Yeah.

And that's, that's one way, but it's.

So important, you know.

Yeah, it is.

We're, we're maybe a little bit less leading, but regardless of what your, your path is of getting there, it.

What do you want to fix?

And then here's some possible paths forward.

Another thing we do is we, we don't believe in guarantees.

We believe in odds of success.

Homes are complicated, interconnected problems.

So you don't want to say, oh, yeah, absolutely, this will fix it.

Does your doctor ever tell you, oh, yeah, absolutely, on pain of death, with full refund, this, this will fix your problem.

No, it's odds of success.

Because, yeah, we do stupid stuff.

Yeah.

What I can tell you is it will improve.

Yes.

Or if they're buying something bad, like single stage stuff, part of our verbiage is you can expect similar or perhaps slightly degraded levels of comfort.

Because when you're moving up the efficiency scale on a furnace, if you go from an 85 to a 96 or 98 and it's the same size furnace, you actually just increase the output of that furnace by a chunk, you know, 5, 10,000.

It's actually more oversized than it was before.

Yeah.

So, you know, when it turns on in the winter and all of a sudden it feels like a blast furnace, it's going to be worse.

Yep, exactly.

And then it's going to shut off sooner.

And the same thing on the air conditioning side, as we push to higher sear and we hurt the sensible heat ratios and it does less dehumidification they're probably going to have a damper house and we should let them know that.

And also because now we're running ECMs, if we don't check for duct pressure, like we could own some fan failure years.

But if you at least let them know and you offer them duct pressure or external static pressure testing, at least you don't own it.

Right?

Right, absolutely.

And so then you can offer, come in and legitimately offer a solution without them feeling it later.

Offers a solution without them feeling like, well, why didn't you tell me to start with?

I would have done it all.

Because how many times have you heard, well, I would have done it all to start with if you just told me.

So that's one last piece.

It's built, but it sucks.

The first iteration just came out.

It went up and have you ever been like so excited to get something and you get it, you're just like, oh God, it's a terrible.

Oh, that's dramatic.

Not what I expected.

I'm like, oh, so that, that was me.

What was it like Monday when the next release got pushed?

And I look at it, I'm like, we're not putting this out yet.

This needs some more work.

But we're working on a semi automated email tool where you click a button and it pulls up your email window like whatever you're using and it pre.

Populates the client email subject line, the.

Whatever the, the template is, you know, if it's.

You're going to do the free quote or whatever and then it CCS the system so that it acts as a CRM and then you can actually see what happened.

Oh, nice.

So it goes in there.

So it's, it's a CRM as well.

It's.

If you're looking for a good CRM, this ain't it.

But, but it is a CRM.

Like it's, it's meant to be.

We view it as a sales management tool more than anything.

Sure.

But mainly storing the notes along the way of what happens.

So you have a database to reference back.

And I see in your record we did this, this and this and you, you turned it all down, but now's the time to talk about it.

Exactly.

Or my, my static pressure is really high.

My, my, my system just died early.

Well, do you remember when I offered you static pressure testing for $25 and you declined?

That was a $2,000 mistake this year and it's going to be a $2,000 mistake in two more years.

Like this is going to keep failing or we can deal with.

How are we going to do with the root cause anyway?

Where I'm going with this is we want education to be offered to clients multiple times.

And like it's the, the old thing of you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.

But if you can document that you sent them education multiple times and they didn't do it and then they chose poorly, whose fault is that?

Of course it's there.

Yeah.

Now will it stand up in court for sure.

Who knows?

I mean, I can sue you for being too good looking, you know, like it doesn't really mean anything.

But will it reduce the risk?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You'll have some, you know, people in court, some attorneys or lawyers that just look at that and be like, well, you're, you're okay, you're c way.

And I can tell you this because the last company I was with here, there was a long carrying lawsuit that, you know, like any sales team, there was a gentleman that went out and it was actually we, we did the full manual J.

We had all the documentation.

Everything was done according to the standards.

And turns out the house was different than it was scoped for.

The homeowner changed something and humidity levels changed, developed a organic growth in the house.

A couple people got sick.

The homeowner just happened to be a litigation attorney, of course, and levied.

It levied a suit against the company and oh my gosh, it was a year and a half court battle and cost this.

They were asking for just insane amount of money.

And then of course the owner was.

Got to the point, he was like, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fight this and win.

Just for principle at this point.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

Like I have the, the company has the money.

I'm gonna fight this because it's just stupid.

We did everything we were supposed to do and they changed things.

But at the end of the day, who wants that?

And you know, most companies cannot bear that burden.

It would, it would put most companies out of business.

So I 100% applaud the documentation process.

So that doesn't happen.

Yep.

It helps reduce that.

By the way.

One, one thing, maybe it's worth putting into your mix.

So sometimes I'm viewed as anti ventilating dehumidifier, which they're a great solution because you get fresh air filtration and dehumidification in one machine, which is nice, but they don't have crazy long lifespans.

They're like five or 10 years like the odds of them lasting as long as the H VAC system is not real hot.

High.

Right.

But we strongly believe if you're in a humid climate, you should offer that every single time and have clients decline it, because that could have avoided that whole lawsuit.

Potentially 100.

Like, of course he still could have sued.

He's a litigation lawyer, so, you know, whatever doesn't necessarily stop it.

I didn't like the color of the guy's hat.

You know, whatever, but.

Right.

My dad, no joke, got sued because a car he restored wouldn't go up a hill in fourth gear.

Anyway.

Your dad got sued because the car wouldn't care.

Wouldn't go up a hill in fourth gear.

Yeah.

It was a 1911 Mercedes.

Oh, geez.

It would go up the hill in second.

But that was actually one of the complaints of a lawsuit.

Like, that's a stupid lawsuit.

Yeah.

And my dad actually ended up winning 3 million.

Wow.

Wow.

Which was pretty wild because the guy also basically put my dad out of business restoring cars, so.

Oh, geez.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Defamation and all that, right?

Yep.

Defamation and interference with business practices were the two things.

Anyway, offer a ventilating dehumidifier every time and have them sign off that they don't want it.

Great.

Sure.

No problem.

But it's there because a basement dehumidifiers sometimes.

Or crawl space dehumidifiers sometimes.

They work.

Okay.

But if you don't have a good connection to the ductwork for the whole house.

Right.

It will only dry that space.

Sure.

Yeah.

It's definitely got to interconnect somehow.

Yep.

But, like, if you don't want to add a return to that space if there's any natural draft combustion in that space because it'll backdraft it.

Well, it's not sure it's likely to.

Yeah.

And so you have to be careful with that sort of thing.

And now you can't dry the whole thing.

So there's.

There's all of these interconnections.

But a ventilating dehumidifier that's tied into the ductwork of the house will keep the house dry.

Right.

I love it.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Well, we are.

I. I feel like we could do 10 episodes.

My background in your background is so similar, especially it getting to know you.

So for all the listeners we talked yesterday on the phone, it was going to be, hey, let's chat for, you know, five or 10 minutes and see if we, you know, see if we relate.

We ended up talking for an hour and about it Might as well have been a podcast.

And then we hop on this podcast and normally my interviews are about an hour, so we're pushing about an hour and a half, which is fine because, I mean, it's a podcast.

There's no limits here.

And I do what I want because it's my podcast, but at the end of the day, I try to manage it a little bit.

But thank you so much for coming on today.

Let's.

Let's land this plane a little bit.

I love that.

So you said electrify everything.net is your one website.

I love that we need to talk more because I definitely want to get more involved with, with a lot of that that's going on.

And how do the contractors get in touch with you to find out more about H Vac 2.0?

Well, my email is natehvac2o.com.

Okay.

But the, the better way to go is just to go to h vac2o.com and there's a link for free onboarding so that you can begin to learn.

And fair warning, right now, I'm not happy with it, but I'm going to.

Like, I've been wanting to change it desperately and I was waiting for the software to catch up so I can train using the actual software.

And it might be there today.

Like it pushed last night.

So I have to look.

One of my jobs this afternoon is to look through and see if it.

How close it is.

Right on.

Yeah, we're.

So we're recording mid May, so by this will.

This episode will go up probably the near the 1st of June, 2023.

So there's a good chance that'll probably be there.

So just for clarification, that's H vac20.com Correct.

Perfect.

Okay.

And if you want to check out my book, the home comfort book, which if you're curious at all, like about the building performance side and actually zooming out and looking at the entire house.

Most of it's free there.

And It's Nate the Housewhisperer.com.

Nice.

And that's, that's going to be a really good start.

And if you like it, the, the hard copy from Amazon's really nice.

Like it.

It's like a coffee table book.

It's my, my wife is a designer and she helped me with that.

And it's, it's pretty and it has nice illustrations.

It's funny.

It's like the reverse of Playboy.

It's like I read it for the pictures.

Oh, I thought you were going to say the reverse of Playboy.

As if you read it to get turned off.

Well, maybe.

I mean, you're certainly not reading it to get turned on.

But, you know, it's like I read it for the articles.

You know, you always hear that that reflects.

Actually, I get.

When I, when I dive into nerding out and the.

In houses, especially when it comes to home performance and the science.

And, you know, rumor has it, once upon a time, I actually have a physics degree.

And so I went right in.

It's, you know, it's not like a master's or anything, but I do, I do have one.

And then went into H vac and could actually apply some of the stuff I learned in college, unlike most people.

And the more that I got into home performance, I was like, this makes so much sense.

I finally understand why houses work.

And so that's why for me, that's why I was able to jump into, you know, home performance 2.0, 3.0 pretty easily because they just already had the concepts.

But I love the home comfort book being that bridge for people that don't have a physics degree but want to learn about, you know, all the things.

Because at the end of the day, it's what, what's the main concept that drives home performance is heat moves, what, from more to less and pressure moves from more to less.

And if you understand those two things.

And humidity also moves from more to the less.

So if you understand those three things, everything else will start to fall in places the more you learn about it for the listeners out there.

So that's the, that's the fun part is if you can view it through those lenses, all of a sudden the rest is going to start to make sense for you.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, taking a step back, like, I, I like physics, I like houses, I like people.

This, this is where I'm supposed to be when you put those together.

And yeah, so it's, you have to figure that out.

The, the, the hard part then is like figuring out the physics isn't really that hard.

Yeah.

You and I can probably scope half of houses from the street.

Absolutely.

Like, you're good.

Oh, look, it's got a crawl space.

We're going to need to encapsulate that.

I'll, I'll bet that it's a ranch house and it's got a basement or whatever we're going to need to deal with above the, the stairway in the attic.

Abc right below condition space in that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, all that stuff is, is relatively easy.

The hard Part is convincing the client to spend the money.

That's actually the hard part.

I feel like if you're open to this idea, we should do another episode specifically on some of.

To give people some word tracks and language of.

Of exactly that.

Because this has been a real high level theory comp interview.

I feel like we should spend some time talking about.

Here's how to communicate best and maybe even a little role playing because I'm with you.

I would love to see all of the contractors that are worth their salt in the country and around the world because this podcast goes to about 20 countries or better start to adopt this, adopt this concept and with the right word tracks, you know, the conversation is not that hard if you understand some of the ways to break it down.

And analogies are your best friend when it comes to explaining home performance.

So yeah, so we'll get that scheduled for everybody, all the listeners.

No idea you know when that is going to launch, but we'll put it together.

In fact, email me, Sam, close it now.net if you would like to have that podcast.

If you would like some of that training, if there is enough and kind of we'll talk offline.

I have some ideas for things so we could.

Might be able to put together some little mini sessions and stuff to put out for people that would like to learn some of that language.

Track to point in the direction to get people hooked into your H Vac 2.0.

Because I would do.

I. I feel like everybody should be doing this and most people are either unaware or they don't want to take the steps to offer it.

It's hard just.

It's either learning or, you know, it could be funding.

It could be a lot of things.

But there's.

There's ways everyone can start doing this if they just knew how.

And so thank you for giving people the tools to be able to learn how to.

Well, thank you, Sam, for having me on.

And I'm glad we finally got to meet.

Like, it's just so weird.

How did we not cross paths after all?

This is kidding.

But here we are.

Yep, here we are.

It happened this time for a reason.

So yeah.

So thanks for that, man.

I'm excited about what, what you're doing.

It's.

It's definitely changing the face of.

I mean, I've heard of the Electrify Everything.

You know, Chris Wisniewski up in New Jersey has been a big fan of you for a long time.

I know.

Are you involved with the Electrify Everything Facebook group?

I started it okay, so I'm in there.

I just didn't know.

Yeah, I'm not like necessarily all that leaderly oftentimes in there.

And then frankly, I got so frustrated with the fart sniffing side of things.

Then I'm like, I'm out.

I'm done.

Like, the questions were just like so inane.

Like, I kept having to narrow things because I've purposely been trying to keep that a politically purple group.

So the only thing we can talk about without getting the stupid pissing contests is the actual projects and doing the work.

That is the only thing we can talk about.

Absolutely.

And it's like, it's so annoying.

Like, I'd love to be able to talk about policy, but I can't because then, then you get, you know, like taxation is theft on one side and we should force everybody to do this on the other side.

And it's like.

And I'm like, you know what?

Peace out.

So I, I backed out of my own group.

Yep.

So everybody listening?

The, the Electrify everything group on Facebook.

You can just search that Google or search on Facebook Electrify everything.

You'll find it all the.

I'll put all the links in the.

In the episode when it goes up.

Nate@h vac2oh20.com Nate the House Whisperer.com and go, go buy the book, the home comfort book by Nate Adams.

It will give you, if nothing else, a really nice coffee table book.

But hopefully you read it and start implementing because it's in fact, it's less about the knowledge, it's much more about implementation.

Success happens at the speed of implementation.

So everybody go start trying some of this stuff.

The simplest thing you can do as an H VAC contractor out there is tell people, hey, listen, you've got your attic scuttle.

What we're going to do that nobody else offers is we're going to insulate that sucker and we're going to seal it.

There's extra value right there.

I mean, you would be amazed at how much a loss just happens with that one thing.

So simple, easy.

Start there and expand.

The main thing is just do something more than you're doing right now because everybody in a house has problems and they need help.

So.

Well, awesome.

Well, thanks for joining us.

We're going to land this plane and you'll.

I think you'll appreciate the.

The way we always end out.

Okay, all you contractors out there, all you project managers, comfort consultants, business owners, go save the world one heat stroke at a time.

Thanks for listening.

To close it now with Sam Wakefield.

Subscribe to the podcast now so you're first to hear new episodes jam packed with actionable tools and tips to make you the top H Vac professional in your market.

If you have friends and colleagues who would like this show, share it with them and send them to our Facebook community for more more in depth discussion about the challenges we all face and how to overcome them on the Close it now podcast.