Welcome to Close it now, the podcast that's revolutionizing the H Vac and home improvement trades industries. Get ready to dive deep into the world of heating, ventilation and air conditioning. We're turning up the heat on industry standards and cooling down misconceptions. And we're not just talking about fixing vents and adjusting thermostats. It's about the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement. We're the driving force, inspiring top performers who crave excellence not only in their professional endeavors, but also in fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. This is Close it now, where excellence meets excitement. Let's get to work now your host, Sam Wakefield.

Well, all right. Welcome back to Close It Now. Sam Wakefield, Here it is time again for another interview. This time someone within our industry who is doing some incredible stuff. You have heard me say over and over on this podcast, if you've listened at all and if you haven't, go back and listen to all the podcasts. Because anything that's been done the Same way for 50 plus years is ripe for, for revolution. And that's exactly what's going on in our industry right now. So I'm so excited to actually, the reason that I connected with this person is so many of you listeners have messaged me about this product and how incredible it is and that I must check it out. So thank you, Tony. Tony Manier. You read, you, you actually sent me this woman's email address and I contacted her and we had a demo and now we're doing a podcast because everybody listen up. This is the coolest manual J software I've seen ever in all of my years in the heating and air industry. So I'm so excited today to introduce to you Shelby Breger. She is a co founder at Conduit, which if you haven't heard about Conduit, you're going to today and you will hear about it from now on, moving forward because it's man, it's the bee's knees. It's the coolest thing since sliced bread. So she lives in Florida with her husband. They are in Fort Lauderdale, but watch out, they're moving to the planet of Jupiter here pretty soon. Hopefully at least thinking about that, who knows. But they're holding down, based in Florida, travel all over, elevating our industry to the next level with this. So thank you for being taking time out of your busy schedule to be on the show today, Shelby, appreciate it.

Well, thank you for Having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. Awesome. So let's get started with when we were talking before, you had mentioned that, you know, you didn't really come from this industry, you came from a little bit of different place. So fill everybody in, give them, give them your highlight reel. How in the world did you, you know, what, what's your experience and how are you suited to do what you're doing now? How'd you land at H Vac with manual J load calculation software of all things to throw a dart and hit. And more importantly, you know, we in this podcast and our community, we, we want to know what makes you tick. So tell us a bit about your business and life philosophy as well.

Amazing. Well, we got a lot to cover there, so I'll start off with experience. Prior to starting Conduit, my co founder Marissa we I, I was focused on industrial energy efficiency. So I was literally working in a paper mill working on technology them run more efficiently and it was very interesting but sort of slower moving work and not because the company moved slow, the company moved very fast. But what we, what I saw was that innovation takes so much time of creating new technologies, new platforms and I wanted to be a little bit closer to something that felt more tangible to me. Of course, like yes, I use paper towels and I use, you know, like envelopes and things like that on a regular basis. But I wanted to be a little bit closer to something that impacted me directly, impacted, you know, my friends, my families directly. And something that just got me a little bit more excited. And so I started looking at residential energy efficiency, just learning, I talked to whoever would talk to me about just, you know, how do you think about your home's energy use? How do you think about comfort levels in your home? And the more I learned, the more I realized H Vac is the biggest driver of this. Not only of residential energy use, but also just of home comfort and how we feel on a day to day basis. Anyone who knows me knows one of the reasons I'm thinking about moving is because the room that I have my office in is so uncomfortable and renters. So I'm constantly thinking about this.

You can't change it. Even you can't.

I can't even change it. I think about it all the time and I run a manual J all the time and it always shows me that it's designed incorrectly. Anyways, we digress but I definitely wanted some to be somewhere more tangible. And what I quickly found was I just found this draw towards H Vac because here you have an industry where there's been efficient equipment, there's been electric equipment, there's been all kinds of things that have been introduced over the last few decades that you don't see implemented or purchased by homeowners very often. And so then I was like, okay, well, why isn't a homeowner investing in higher seer equipment? Why aren't they investing in a heat pump in certain climate zones where that can actually save the money? And the answer is very obvious to any of your contractors who are listening in right now is because it's hard. And homeowners don't necessarily know what they don't know, and they don't always listen to the contractor who can give them this counsel. And so it was such an interesting, like, problem of, like, the technology's here, the contractors are ready to offer it, and homeowners just don't get it. And so I started to just figure out, like, just talk to people. How do we change that? How do you create this, like, triple win where a customer can be more comfortable, which then in turn often is because it's a more efficient sort of setup for that home. And how can you have that homeowner be more comfortable? The contractor can make a little bit more margin or a little bit more revenue off of that install, and then our grid overall benefits because it's more stable, because not every home home is overusing energy because they have oversized equipment. And so we started thinking about this problem, and I met my co founder, Marissa, along this journey. She was on the same, like, the same, like, I don't know, odyssey that. That I was on of just trying to figure out where could we have a impact on communities that we care about? And we first were like, do we approach this problem from the customer standpoint? Do we approach this problem from a utility standpoint? Who do we try and build a solution for to solve that sort of like, core? How do you create this triple win scenario that we call it? And what we found, we were like, let's give ourselves a month to figure out who we want to work with. And we interviewed probably 100 people in that month. And we're like, very definitively at the end, we're like, we want to build something for contractors. Like, these are the people we want to work with. And the reason they were the people that we want to work with is because they were so. They were. They are. They are now like the community that we are part of. But as outsiders, people welcomed us in. And what they wanted was just to help the industry. And I will say that about our earliest, our earliest customers, our earliest users. You mentioned Tony Manier. He is somebody who just like, let us ride along with him to learn about his, his role and figure out ways that we could support him before even trying to say, hey, try using our product to use this. And that was just, that's how we got started is we first, like both found a problem area we wanted to work on, and then we found an incredible group of human beings that we wanted to work with. And then, then from there we had to figure out what to build, which is a whole separate relationship. But I'll pause.

No, this is so cool because, I mean, so many times it's so fun to work that direction instead of being like, I have this cool idea for a product, I wonder if anybody can use it. Right. And so you're very specifically like, narrowing it down the 1, the industry, what you're wanting to do, big mission, but then who you want to work with. And that's the best part about business ownership is you get to work with who you want to, not who you have to to. And so I, I love how, where this is going. And so, so how did you come up with conduit and what it is today? So obviously you had to figure out what you were going to do. So tell us that next part of the journey here.

Yeah, so the first nine months of it was a, was a journey where, you know, we decided who we wanted to build for. And then we were like, what do we want to build? And what solves the core pain points? The first thing that we had to ask is like, what are you struggling with, Mr. Or Mrs. Business owner, GM salesperson. And it this 2021, early 2022. And so of course the answers were like, we have an equipment shortage, we have a labor shortage, and we can't close our sales on site. Like, we are struggling to do all three. And there's a lot of reasons for each one. Well, for us, you know, we couldn't really do anything about the equipment shortage. We looked at the labor shortage problem and we're like, okay, we can work with this if we can find ways to help streamline the entry into this industry. But that's not going to be, that can't be the core focus because that's not where we have expertise that we can bring from other industries. So we at this challenge of like, how do you close sales? How do you make them an engaging experience? How do you differentiate from your competition and how do you Communicate these really challenging points around, like, why you should invest in something better. And so that's where we really focused in on. And that was like, okay, that was what we wanted to do. Now once we discovered those pain points, we were like, how do we solve these pain points? And so I will tell you, we built, deployed, got feedback on a bunch of other different products that are not the one that we now have in market. So we tried building a predictive maintenance platform. We did actually build a prototype with sensors and everything to record data. And what we found was the response from contractors was like, oh, that's cool. And we're like, that is not going to be a winning solution, because if it's just cool, it's not. It's not to you, that doesn't solve a burning pain. And that means that we're not doing our job. So we also looked at things like rebate finders or other sort of, like, sales tooling that we could build out. But what we found was that, you know, it didn't have one. It just served too small of a group of folks. It didn't solve enough people's pain, and it just didn't solve, like, the core challenge that folks were facing in the field. So one of the later things that we tested this was coming up in. In 2022, summer 2022, that's where we tested sort of this design and sales platform idea. And we built a very lean prototype, started showing it to people, and they were like, I want that. I'm ready for it. Let's go. And those were our early development partners, of which we are super fortunate. These were people who are willing to take a chance on us in our very first few days, expecting nothing in return. Just, like, they were willing to say, hey, like, yeah, I'll talk to, you know, I'll talk to your investors, or I'll talk to so and so about, like, why I think this could be really helpful and useful. And we started building for them, and then they gave us feedback. They would test our prototypes and give us feedback, and then we improve and iterate and we'd go from there. So it was a winding journey to start building this product, but it required testing and listening because ultimately, like, building something that no one wants would be the worst outcome, Right?

Yeah. Especially the investment, the time and, oh, my gosh, so much of that. Well, I love this so much because it. Yeah, it just. It feeds something in our industry that's been missing for so long. I want to take a quick second because I know we're going to do some more. Actually, for everybody listening, I'm going to give you some actual training of like how and where to use a Manual J load calculation and the right way to do it and the reasons why we should be doing it. And actually, if you're listening too, we're going to do a much deeper dive in an evening coming up here this next week. We're going to talk about the dates, but I'm going to do a really solid free training on how to use Manual J. If it's this program, if it's a different program, it doesn't matter. It's just like you got to be using it. So it's such a need in our industry. But 20, 30 years ago, everybody did a Manual J load calculation. It's like almost everyone did. And now it's such a weird trend to me that so many companies are getting away from AHCA approved manual Js. And for all of you out there using EDS, yes, it's a quick, easy program. But I am here to tell you, if it's not Manual J, if it's not ACA approved Manual J, it will not stand up in court. Ask me how I know. I'm happy to tell you about how we were in a two to three year legal battle and $300,000 of legal fees to keep the business running. So we can talk about that in depth if you would like to message me offline. But the, the saving grace was we had an ACCA approved Manual J in the customer's file from the day that we sold it and that the lawyer, the judge threw the, threw the, the case out of court and said, well, you did everything you were supposed to. So that is the reason this is so important. So I digress off of my soapbox here. Let's get back to this interview. But I had, I want to mention that for all of you listening, if you don't do a Manual J right now, you must. This is not a request, this is not a good idea. You must do it if you want to differentiate yourself. So, so take us away. I know that was a big journey here, but so you, you started building this thing and people are testing it and they're giving you feedback and then what's happening here?

Yeah, so it was truly an iterative product process. So we were building it probably for six months before we decided, okay, this is in a position where we can sell it, sell it in small amounts, sell to people who are willing to be beta users and really test iterate, improve the product with us. And I just have to say I'm so grateful to all of the folks who did that with us because they like, they literally invited us into their homes to run this on their own homes. Show us, you know, here's where the limitations are. Here's where I'd like to see this. And my favorite thing is then going back to those customers, you know, two months later and saying, here's what we built to meet your feedback. And I will say that like that's what that looked like then. That's also what it looks like now. It's just at a little bit of a different scale. We work with hundreds and hundreds of companies across the United States. We now track all of that feedback in a now over a thousand line spreadsheet. And then we see the volume of things that folks are asking for. And based off of what they're asking for, that's how we prioritize what we build is. You know, something was mentioned 40 times. I won't tell you what was mentioned 40 times, but that's what we're building right now.

Yeah.

And because it was mentioned 40 times, we know like this is a big enough problem for enough of our user base that, that if we solve this, we will make a lot of people a little bit happier with the platform. It might not solve all of their issues, but it will solve a really big thing for them. And we can tell that this matters a lot to them. So I think that's, I have an.

Idea of what it might be because I was talking to somebody earlier who's using the program that said he asked for this and you're like, hey, we're building it this.

I, Yes, I hope, I hope it's this one. One of these features. But I will say like two examples of ones that we released recently. One was a room by room CFM report. So how do you help get from. Yeah, how do you go from your, you've, you've done all this work to do a room by room load. Can you, Can I see my airflow? Can I compare that to what's actually here? That was one thing that I don't know that had at least 100 or request it immediately made it onto our roadmap. People were looking for guidance. How do I go from thinking about a load to thinking about what's the right system? Great. We released a new report around that to help people get to system selection. So for us, everything we build is based off of what do our users want and need. And sometimes they'll Be like, oh, I want this. And it's like, okay, but why do you want that? And getting at that why? Is entirely what we build around. It's the. I want, like, I want something that will help me simplify this part of the workflow. Okay, that's what we need to fix. It's maybe not specifically this solution, but we're looking at those core root problems to then address those and make the platform better. And I think that's one thing that's been amazing and also shocking about this journey is that software never ends, or at least it should never end. No one should ever stop building it because there's always so much opportunity that is opened up just by the last release.

Absolutely. Yeah. Room for improvement. If we, we feel like we. It's just like personal growth or anything else. The minute that we stop growing, we start dying. It's what we see in everything. So I love this so much. So for most people listening right now, conduit is a new word. I mean, we know what a conduit is. You know, clearly it's, you know, houses, electrical wire, or it's a avenue or path for something to get from one place to the next. Right. So I'm curious, why did you name your program Conduit first? And then we'll talk about, give everybody a good bird's eye view of what it is actually, because we don't know yet. It's just manual. J. But what makes it different?

Yeah, So I will tell you. Marissa and I spent about 20 minutes on the name discussion and now it will haunt us or will excite us for the next rest of our lives. But the reason we named it that was because we were looking for a word for connection. And what we want to foster is not a connection with us. I mean, we love that, we love our customers, but we wanted to better foster that relationship between the contractor and the customer. So we were looking for how do we support this connection between the contractor and the customer so that they can build a high trust, high quality relationship based off of a foundation of data, other information, and as well as the explanations that are happening in real life by that professional, professional in the field. And that's where that's where that name came from, is we, like, looked up a bunch of synonyms. We looked for which ones don't have, like, you know, weird urban Dictionary. And like, we also looked to make sure that, like, you know, we could come up with a company name that, that met that need and could, you know, get, get the copyright on the Name whatever we needed to do. So that is, that was the 20 minute process. But I'm so far I'm happy with it. We've had some people be like, huh? But for us, you know, it's, it's a great, it represents what we're trying to do here, which is not, we're not trying to build that relationship with the homeowner. We're trying to help the contractor connect with their homeowner.

Love it. Love it. Well, cool. So give everybody a high level. What is Conduit? What makes it different? Why, why is everybody kind of going nuts about it right now?

Yeah. So Conduit is the lighter powered on site design and sales platform for H vac pros. That's what we like to call them because you all are pros that drive custom customer engagement to help you close your sales every time. And I think for us, the like overarching principle that I always like to say is like, our goal is to help you sell using the quality work you're already doing for your homeowner or the quality work that you wanted to do for them but never could find a cost effective way to do. So. And that's, that's our overarching mission is how do we help you do that? And what is, what are the technologies and tools that can help you do that? So very simply, what happens with Conduit is you would use a LIDAR enabled device. Now those are not as fancy as you think they are. They are as simple as your iPhone pro or an iPad Pro. You're going to walk around the home, scan the home, build out a 3D model. It's an interactive process. You're stopping after each room, the customer's with you. You're talking about the comfort concerns in that room. And then you're scanning it, building an anonymized 3D model. When you're scanning it, what you're doing is you are actually capturing the windows, walls, doors, ceilings and floors. You're capturing the dimensions of all of that. But what you're also doing is you're anonymizing it. So it's not a video, it is just the 3D model, the 2D floor plan with all those dime dimensions. And then what you're doing is with our technology that we're pulling in different data sources for, we are also matching all of that information, the orientations, and we're matching the property data that you can all update to come up with the heat transfer across each one of those materials. So what we're doing is we're taking the manual part out of the manual J. Yeah. But we're still relying on the expert in the home to update the defaults and the assumptions that we'll give you. So we'll give you a great starting place. You'll scan, you'll update any of those defaults, and then you're going to generate a load calculation that's Akka certified. You're going to generate an airflow report if you want it. You're going to generate some system selection guidance. And then the last thing that you can do is you can also visualize equipment. So if you have a mini split that you're proposing for a customer, or if you have a different type of solution that you're proposing for the customer, you can visualize it using augmented reality on their walls and showcase to them what something's going to look like. So it's just a cool tool.

Love it. Okay, so here's your new tagline. It's conduit, the automatic J. Right. No longer manual. Right.

I love it.

Some variation of that. I don't know. My brain, brain just went to work on that. But so cool. So for everybody that is listening, when I saw the demo the other day, I was really surprised at how fast it goes. I expected it to take a little more time because everybody, we've always is. We've had those tape measure apps on our phones for a long time. It's like scan here, move over to there and it's telling you a distance across a wall or whatever. And this is so cool because it's much quicker than that. And basically it was about four times faster than I expected it to be when Shelby spun around in a room the other day to show me how fast it measures a room. And so it's. It, it, it. I'm just, I'm just jazzed on this because, you know, the, the, the slow part of manual J forever was. And if you're still doing this and seeing good results, good on you. But I will tell you the 45 minute journey around the house using your, you know, telling the homeowner, hey, I'll hold the dummy into the tape measure. You can read me what that window measurement is and what that room measurement is. That does not impress people anymore that using AI and LiDAR to accurately say, hey, here, in five minutes, we can get a, an accurate representation of every single thing in your home that causes it to use and lose energy and gain heat and lose heat and air conditioning. We can do that in an instant now because of our technology, that's what impresses people. Now don't, don't think that you have to keep it that low tech all the time. So and more importantly, in 5 minutes to 5, 10 minutes you can have a Akka approved manual J for a home. That didn't take forever. And all this brain work and you know, going through to enter data and all these things that the reason that people have not done manual JS for so long, your excuses are now gone. So that's a quick from my perspective nutshell. I haven't used it personally yet, but I've talked to enough people that have have. So let's turn the corner a little bit. Thank you for that, like telling us what it is. I, I'm curious about the lidar part of it. We've got a couple minutes to, to talk about some things before you get into some actual training on this. Why did you choose lidar? I'm curious about that versus like a, you know, just bin data or using some other sort of a method to measure.

Yeah, good question. So we wanted to use technology that was already available in the pockets of a lot of pros already, the iPhones and the iPads. And we, because we didn't want people to have to carry around something else or learn a totally new type of technology. And so for us we were looking at how do we get accurate but how do we also use use devices and tools that exist out there. And so what we found was there wasn't a sufficient that you could do from the exterior of the home or from you know, up above satellite imagery that wasn't sufficient to actually get the accuracy that these jobs require. And so what we wanted to make sure we could do is provide that accur. When you look at lidar and the innovations that have happened over the last few years in our iPhones and iPads, you have that actually quite accessible for so many users already. And so it was what can we capitalize on that's out there that hasn't just been applied to this industry yet?

Love it, love it. So follow up to that is are we cloud based or is there an offline version?

It is cloud based for now. So mostly because we didn't want to have people need a these even more fancy devices with tons of storage or anything like that. So we wanted it to be accessible.

And available in the cloud and nothing wrong with that. So most of most things are now anyway. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, so I'm losing the track of questions from the sake of just Sheer excitement about this product. It's really what's going on here for everybody listening. So, so, okay, so let's dump into this a little bit. So you've worked with so many contractors now, so many people using this in the house. What are some numbers that you're seeing? You have some metrics around before and after they started implementing conduit.

Yes. So, and I'll, I'll share these in an anonymized way. But what I will say is I actually just got an email this morning which listed out the close rate month by month. So there is the period before, before implementing conduit over a six month period. And that six month period there was a close rate of 33% over the last. If you look at the six months of 2024 to date, they were up to 41 close rate. So that's nearly a, you know, a third increase in close rate over that course of. Over a course of a year. Both sort of comparing the before and after in the same period. So January to July of 2023, January to July of 2020 to apples, they were up over a third in their close rate. That's an example of just like a close rate difference. We've had users reach out to us telling us, this is my best June ever. By the third week of June, I've sold individually $600,000 worth of, of equipment. And the reason I've been able to do this is using conduit. And there's a few different ways that people experience it. Some people who go from having a super detailed manual J process, they're like, I can go to another home. So I'm able to increase my visits by a third. I was never able to do that in the day because I could never get this much work done. That's how some people experience it. Other people just see, you know, I was able to increase my average ticket or my average, my average value because I am now just engaging my customer in a different way. And so what we're seeing is that consistently what's coming back is increased sales conversion and increased ticket sizes or increased total volume. All three of those can happen and drive that same last result. But they can happen for different reasons based off of what the prior process is and what the new process looks like.

Sure, sure. Love this. Oh, love it. So let's, that's actually a perfect setup. Let's take a minute and if it's okay with you, I'd love to. You're the guest here, so I appreciate you being, being on But I'm going to take a quick minute and just walk everybody through a couple best practices for. Because it's not enough. It doesn't matter how incredible your program is this. It's not enough just to do it and show people. Okay, yeah, you should have a 3 ton system. If you don't tell them why you're using it and set the framework and the context for the importance of what you're doing with do it by doing a manual J load calculation. So let's take a minute and everybody listening give you a little bit of best practice here. So when you're setting up the measurement time, you know, ideally you're going through the flow of your sales appointment in the right order. Meaning you've done your company intro first, you've done your personal intro, you've set an agenda. And in the agenda it should sound something like here's the agenda I trained. So you, you get all. Can take some verbiage from this, but in fact, Shelby, would you be my homeowner for real? Real quick and. Well, let's role play this for a second.

I'd be honored.

Perfect. So. So I have a plan for our meeting today to be most efficient and help you best. I'd love to go over that with you now because.

Okay, that sounds great.

All right, perfect. So first of all, I'm just going to ask you a few questions. You get to tell me what you're experiencing and what your concerns are living in your home. Then based on your answers, we're just going to make a short specific list that we call an action list so I know what is important to you. Once we've done that, then I'll measure the whole house, including the attic, basement, crawl space, all the areas that we need to look at so we can run some calculations on your home. Then we'll sit down, I'll show you what those calculations are and tell you what, we'll just work together to come up with a project and a proposal that you would accept. Sound good?

That sounds awesome.

Awesome. So that's the agenda and that's how you introduce at the very beginning what you're going to be doing, the steps of the process. And so once we've done this, then of course we dive into discovery. We're going to ask you about in the summer when some rooms are cool, are others warmer than the rest in the winter are normal questions. And getting into IAQ and all the different things, asking the questions like we normally do. Perfect. Now's the time. Thank you for that. Now's the time that we're going to measure the house like we talked about. I would love. And so we're going to invite them to come on the tour with us. I would love for you to come along with me so we can talk about each of those areas of the house while we're in the space and you could point out anything specific. Sound good? Good.

That sounds great.

Awesome. So now we're along for the journey. And as we're going along on this journey, we're going to stop. And there's two important. For everybody listening, there's two important pieces of collateral that you must find. You can Google them, and you can find them right away. Consumer Reports and the Department of Energy have both put out articles and white papers. A little bit aged now, but you can find them if you Google them. The verbiage in here is very specific. Department of Energy and Consumer Reports both said do not. In fact, the exact verbiage is be leery of a contractor who does not do a manual J load calculation on your home. In fact, Department of Energy says do not use. It says, even run from. Basically a company that does not do this. This is required for accuracy. So what you want to do for everybody is find yourself those articles, print them off and highlight those sentences and show them. Say, listen, Mr. Homeowner or Shelby. Here's what we're about to do. Is it okay if I share with you why this is important?

Please do.

Oh, perfect. So, you know, this is the experts talking. This is, you know, Department of Energy. I'm sure you've heard of them and the Consumer Reports, right? I have, yeah. Perfect. So here, here's a couple articles that I'd love to show you that go over why this is important. First is. And then we'll just read those highlighted lines. Consumer Report says be leery of a contractor who doesn't do this. Department of Energy says, run from a contractor who doesn't do this. And here's why. For so many years, builders or whoever would just put in the cheapest thing possible, which never, in almost every case, means it's not the right size for your home. Have you ever thought about what would happen if your air conditioner wasn't the right size for your house?

No, I literally never thought about that in my life before.

Yeah, exactly. And most people don't. It's okay. But. So remember earlier we talked about those problems in the home that we were having. A big part of that is because of the size of your air conditioner. It's Too big or it's too small. Whatever the case is in this roleplay, we'll say it's too big because we know they mostly are. So what's happening here? The. When you described that, it's just like this jungle feeling and gross in here. What's happening is your air conditioner, it runs too good. It comes on and it shuts off really quickly. But do you know the number one purpose of the air conditioner?

No. It's cooling.

Yeah. Well, it's actually to dehumidify as it dehumidifies and poison pulls the humidity out of the air. That's what makes it feel cooler. Cooler. So if it's too big and runs too good, it doesn't run long enough to be able to pull enough humidity out of the air. So the temperature drops. But that's what's giving it that sticky feeling. You know what I'm talking about?

I do indeed.

Perfect. That's why Department of Energy and Consumer Reports both say it's imperative that it's sized correctly so you don't have that feeling anymore. So that's what we're going to do now is we're to. Going. Going to calculate with this. My tool here is. It's going to use. We're going to use some AI modeling. We're going to use the computer here to get an exact representation of exactly what's going on in the house. So don't worry, we're not taking any pictures. We're just taking measurements so we can know exactly what we need to size this house for. So let's go for a walk around. Let's take a look at all the walls and I'll show. You can follow along with me. We could do it together because it doesn't take very long, but I think you're going to really like what, what this process. Sound good?

That sounds amazing.

Perfect. So timeout. So we. That's. That's basically the conversation, everybody. So you've got to set the context for what you're doing at every step of your appointment. If you don't tell them why you're doing it, they, they don't know. They don't know or even know that they need to care. But the minute that we communicate what we're doing, that's when it becomes. And the, the way we communicate, that's what puts the importance in their mind for why. Why they need to be paying attention and the questions through the engagement. So, so that's the tr. The little bit of training on this. If you Want to know more and we're going to deep dive. I'm giving you some actual scripting and stuff and reference. Get, get your links to those articles and things. Definitely pay attention. Join the Close It Now Facebook group and we're gonna, we're gonna do a whole deep dive into the sales training around how to use the manual J way. But for now, there's your, there's your nutshell version.

I love it. It's. It's spot on though. It's to your point. And this is how we feel about like every single technology out there is. It's only as good as sort of the person who feels skilled in using it. And I think that's so important to how we think about things at Conduit is that we believe training and onboarding and support to feel confident with the technology itself is so vital. One thing I'm super excited about for our webinar on July 9 is just getting folks access to. Here's some examples of how you can talk about this. We give scripts but honestly nothing's. Nothing compares to what Sam's walking you through. And, and for us it's, it's about, you know, our best. The folks who are seeing the greatest results are the folks who feel the most confident not only with the technology but explaining why they're using it in terms that make sense to the homeowner. Because I think. And this is where we're going to continue building technology to support. Of course it's only going to be able to support. We're never going to be able to. Never going to be able to. Nor will we ever want to replace the person in the. With just technology. It's about coaching the customer through and having them be like, no, this really is a problem. This is my pain. Like I, I like this room is really uncomfortable and I do have a window unit in here. And you're right. Like it's really ugly and I have this beautiful colonial home. And maybe it'd be a lot better if it weren't this ugly. And also I were a lot more comfortable in here.

Right? Yeah, exactly. I love those kind of conversations when you, you so quick. Ninja trip Ninja trick on a. Just a one liner here. Real quick, everybody. When somebody's in a house and say they've got like exactly what you described a colonial, but one room's got a window unit in it, ask those questions like, why is this even here? What's the wall shaker in this room for? Right. And they'll tell you. And whatever they tell You. Oh, my gosh. So you're telling me you've got this really incredible colonial house and you paid for the whole thing, but you can't even use it all. You can't even use this room. Why don't we give you your house back? And that's a really fun, powerful line that people very, very much resonate to because it's so important to them. So, quick side note there. But that's fun. But. And you're right, it's like so much goes on that we can address. We can help people in so many ways. So I'm curious, this with. I know AI is all of the rage, all the topic, how integrated are you using AI in this program? And what's your kind of future vision for the evolvement of conduit?

So the technology that we're building out is primarily based off of LIDAR sensors and augmented reality. The goal is for us to continue to expand the different technologies and software stack that we're bringing in. Right now, we have primarily focused on those two. One, to really visualize what's going on in the home. But you're absolutely right. The next step is how do we actually provide better tools to predict what. What might be the right way to talk to your customer? What might be the right way to present materials that are customized similar to that Consumer Reports example or that Department of Energy example. How can we showcase to the customer this is the right solution for your home? And so that's where a lot of our future development is going. And I think there's a lot of different applications for artificial intelligence. There's yet again, all focused on streamlining those workflows.

Oh, I love it. That's so beautiful too, because as it builds out, I can, I mean, I'm visualizing a ton of different ways it can be used, but that, that's super powerful to be able to build some of that in. So the homeowner answers a few questions or we answer ask a few questions at the beginning, and based on the answers, it's going to start to predict the right, you know, the way that it presents things back to them according to their hospital buttons. So very beautiful. Love the design. So let's talk a little bit about how companies can, you know, is this on a. Can a single user say, you know, get conduit? Is this need to be on more of an enterprise scale? What does that look like?

Yes, we do both. For us, we. We work with teams of all sizes, so we work with owner operators who do everything in the field. And we work with teams of dozens and dozens or hundreds of salespeople. So we, we span that gamut. And for us, the, the main thing that we work with right now are the main. Our primary users tend to be more dedicated sales professionals. So folks who are spending most of their time selling in the field, whether that be the business owner or whether it be, you know, one of five team members who are doing so, so it really does vary. It is a subscription model for those users and what we include as part of that is training, support, support and ongoing coaching as, as people want and need it. Because that's to us, is super important. It's not just about that software. It's about the service that we can offer on top of it. So people feel like they can make the most out of it in the field and take advantage of it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you don't want to end up with the program that everybody, everybody knows. I'm not going to say any names here, but everybody knows this incredible program that everybody uses. And everyone hates to learn because it's the beast and it takes forever to learn. And so half the companies that sign up for it end up not using because the customer service with this company is so bad. Don't be that.

Don't be that. No, and we don't. That's exactly where we don't want to be. We, we want, we know that our technology is only going to have staying power if our users are using it regularly and getting the most out of it. And that's what we care about the most, is seeing them take, take advantage of what we have to offer and helping make sure that they're, they feel like they can. And, and our, our users do feel that way, but that's why we like to invest up front in, in a great onboarding process and a great support process because we know that once people feel like they're off to the races, they're off to the races. They, they don't, they don't need our help at that point. They're more just honing their craft and we'll be there when they want, want our help and we want them to reach out because we do love them. But we also take it as a good sign as like, okay, this is, they're sort of like, you'll hear from some of our most active users. In fact, we're reaching out to them to check in, like, and answer questions. We're like, hey, we haven't heard from you in a while. Is like, everything okay? It looks like you're using the platform beautifully. Like you're using it so many times a week. But like, we want to make sure, like, just tell us what we can improve now. Like you, you've now, like, you know how to use everything. But like now where can we make it better? Like, you're a super user. How do we help you?

Sure, sure. Oh, I love this. That's the, that's always the biggest struggle is like, if somebody's not using it, why. And like any tool, if we don't use the tools, then we're the tool. So everybody don't be the tool. Use the tool. Right? You don't have to do it all in your head. It's okay to use some tools. Yeah, it's, it's really powerful. So I keep getting distracted in this conversation because I just am so excited to use, use it myself directly. So I'm going to put you on the spot here, Shelby. It's my podcast. I can do this. So would it be possible because I do so many on site trainings, would it be possible for me to get an active version of this thing so I can use it when I'm training on site to be able to show some of these, show some companies 1, how it works and also R and D the process, myself itself to be able to incorporate it into some more elements of the process here?

Absolutely. Because we'll get to benefit and learn from that as well. So we would love, we would love that. And actually this is a great opportunity that if you're a trainer or an educator in the industry, listening to this podcast reach out to us, we are always excited to hear your feedback and work with you all. Because for us, our expertise is in listening to feedback, building for our customers and continuously improving and learning from, from what we see working when we test and iterate, whether it be in our onboarding or in our product. But for us, we learn so much from a fantastic community of educators and those were some of our first folks who really took us under their wings and showed us, showed us so much about the industry. So please do reach out to us if you are an educator, a trainer, a coach in this industry. Because we want to make sure that you, if you want to take advantage of the platform or use it that we can to provide that.

Love it. So everybody listening. Keep, keep listening because I will be, I'll be dropping in my real take on this, on this program. I don't, I won't pull any punches. So if it sucks, it sucks. If it's awesome it's awesome. But you'll hear firsthand as I begin to use it on site what my impression is of it. And you know, so far I absolutely love everything I've seen and I have a handful of trusted people like we mentioned. Tony, there's actually another shout out to guy Jacob Willis over Eagle Pro. What's up Bradley over in Mo in the in Muscle Shoals. Alabama and so is that Alabama. Yeah, Muscle Shoals, wherever that is the the Leonard Skynyrd song. Anyway, huge shout out. They're using it and it's doing pretty incredible stuff for for them. Fun story Jacob. He had a over $100,000 week this last week week and he is brand spanking new to H Vac sales. He was a TM on the industrial or on the commercial or on the supplier side for a long time but this last week so big shout out over it was like I said like 140k for a week and he is using this religiously so not saying it's directly related as the entire reason for that because he's got some great ingredients but it definitely helps. That's right. Sure. So let's do this, the last part of this interview here. I would love to go into a little bit more of some vision for the vision for Conduit. So the one thing that we got talking and we didn't get to hear from you earlier was more of a mission statement, more of a business philosophy. We've gotten the vibe of it, but I would love to hear more articulation, updated version of that. And where do you see Conduit going?

This is a great question. I would say it's going sort of where our users help us define. It's definitely so this the the what we're focused on, the remainder this year is building out more and more sales tooling to customize that customer experience. And then from there it's really wide open spaces. I think what we've learned so much along this journey is I think we we always envision building a design and sales platform and getting to what we're starting to build out now. But it's funny, the design process opened up so much opportunity for our users to make their lives easier and there's still opportunities in that in that area. And so I think for us, so much of that journey is undefined. But it's it will be defined based off of the feedback we get from our customers. Because for us, we like to build for the people who are most excited by our platform build for the group that is getting the most out of it and then also tools that will help their teams get more out of it going forward. And that's, that's sort of how we think about our development. So it's really, it really is not fixed at this point because we want to, we want to listen to our users and our customers. And I have to tell you there's like I mentioned that thousands and thousands of lines in our spreadsheets, but those spreadsheets represent like here's all the different things that we could build to make this better and we could spend all of our time, just infinite amount of time building everything out there. So I think that's sort of the vision is like how do we continue to serve our customers the best, improve, iterate and relentlessly listen so that we can build the best solution to support our pros in standing out on site, having those hundred thousand dollar weeks every week and really excelling.

Sure. I love it. That is, that, that's so powerful. It's when you, you truly have. That's actually the answer I was hoping for. For, because when you, you know, when you have the mission to help enough people get anything they want, you can have anything you want. The classic Zig Ziglar. Right. And that's, that really aligns with the heart of this podcast and, and my mission which is to up level our entire industry. You know, it's, it's way been too many years where the running joke in our industry is well how many heart attacks have you had and how many wives are you on? It's awful. And right. So to uplevel our industry for so many different, in so many ways of serving our home, to be able to serve our homeowners better. And something I say a lot is I'm the laziest, hardest working salesperson you'll ever meet. You will not outwork me, but I could almost guarantee you're not going to be more efficient and because I constantly look for things like this to make my life easier and shorter and smoother. So, so that's a huge part of it is finding the right tools to do the job right. You know, there's, there's no substitute for the right tool.

Oh, I love that. The laziest hard working person you'll ever meet. I think that is a great attribute because it's not as, you know, like it's, it's not as like self promoting as saying what you really are, which is a super efficient person. But it's. Yes, I love that. I think that like being lazy in many ways. Or like that element of laziness. Laziness, which is not truly laziness of like how can I shortcut. This is a really, really valuable thing. And something we always think about is like, there's so much you can do with that time in the home. Let's make sure we get the most out of it.

Right? Right. Yeah. Why don't you sit there for 45 minutes with a calculator trying to run the exact measurement of every window. It's like, come on, 10% of your wall area is windows in every normal stick built house. We don't need to know every window to mentioned. That's the old school way of thinking. Right. So I love this, love this. So this podcast is known for put you on the spot one more time. We're known for every episode, leaving the, the listeners with some actionable item that they can implement immediately. So what would you, what words of wisdom would you give to them? What would you share? Something around the manual J. Right. Or anything else that you found helpful. You've worked with hundreds and thousands of representatives at this point. What are some best practices that you can share? 1 or 2 that would really be helpful today.

I don't know if this is best practice, but this is the number one thing I've learned, which is that when you're going to adopt a new technology, you have to be ready to invest in it. And, and our process is super simple. We know our technology is pretty quick to learn, but you're still going to have to invest some time to just getting comfortable. And I think that with it. So you feel empowered inside the home to really make the most of it. And I think the words of wisdom I guess I would pass on is like learning anything new takes a little bit of time and it's well worth it once you've learned it. And I won't say that specifically about our technology, but I think about myself being, you know, a lazy, hardworking person is when I have learned ways to make my life better, more efficient. Yes, it's a little painful in the first little bit, but as soon as I have implemented them, it can be so much better. And so I'd say don't let the, don't one, invest in the process change, but two, don't let the fear of that investment keep you from getting started. Because I think the returns can be so significant. And I don't mean that specifically just about our technology, I mean that about so many out there that there is so much opportunity to really transform your business if you're looking for it and you'll find what's right for you. But the investment will be, it will take an investment no matter how easy it looks. And that's not to scare anyone away. It's to encourage people to make that jump, make that leap, because it will. You will see the returns. It just requires a little time.

I love this. Yeah, it's a huge difference in thinking of it in terms of how much is this going to cost and thinking of it in terms of with an investment, there's a return on it. Is the, what is the return going to look like? And you're right. This is if you know people are investing into coaching or training, if they're investing into, you know, a product like this, a software, a new van, it doesn't matter. But it's worth it for when you, like, change that to the investment mindset versus just how much will it cost Mindset. Well, thank you for that. That's super powerful. Well, awesome. What is time to land this plane, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Shelby, with Conduit. I totally appreciate you being on the show. I'm excited to see where Conduit goes. I'm excited to see how fast it goes because honestly, the things that are out there have been the same for I've been using some of the same things for 15 years now and they haven't changed anything, right? Hardly. And it's becoming behind. So it's nice to see something that is right at the cutting edge of technology, within reach and in grasp that we can use right now and make our lives easier. Okay, last question for you. How in the world do people get a hold of you? And to learn more about Conduit, where do they go to stay in touch?

Well, the best way to stay in touch, you can reach out to me directly. It's going to be shelbyetconduit.com so our, our website address is also the same. It's going to be getconduit.com G-E-T c O-N-U-I-T.com so those are going to be the two best ways. You can always book a time with us directly through our website or you can just email me directly@shelbyetconduit.com Perfect.

And for everybody listening, the Shelby's email that's S H E L B Y her email will be in. The contact info will be in the show notes and I'll also make sure to have the the Git Conduit website link in the show notes as well. So make sure to go get in touch to learn more about this really cool program. Also, everybody listening. If you hear this and you connect through Close it now we have a special discount exclusively for you. I told Shelby I don't want a single dollar from this. I would rather see my community get a little bit of a discount on this because because everyone needs to use this program. So go check it out and you'll mention Close it now and Shelby will hook you up with a discount. A couple quick announcements everybody. One go to CloseItNow.net, you can learn more about the coaching programs on site training for your companies. I just confirmed going to Canada in October, so Saskatchewan here we come. And also there is a real good chance I'm headed to the east coast again soon, so watch out for that. Also virtual I have a handful of one on one coaching sessions that are still open. I don't do this super often, but when I do open up one on one coaching they fill up really fast. So reach out to me samoseitnow.net, you can learn more about what it looks like in the one on one coaching program with me directly and talk about a way to get you to the next level as fast as possible. So that is something else that is being offered right now. So go check that out. You can still get the online course while it's available@h vacdoors.net and we'll make sure that that link had a couple issues. So if you catch a bug with it, let me know. Otherwise it's going. I'll make sure it's working. And until next time everybody. Again, Shelby, thanks for being on. Till next time, be someone worth buying from.

You've been listening to the Close it now podcast. Our passion is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement and at the same time covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all.

All.

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