Chase Hazelwood: Turnover is very good and very healthy. If you don't have turnover, you're not asking your people to be the best versions of themselves because if you were, people would quit.
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Paul Giannamore: Fat Pat, we've got two new co-hosts on The Buzz here in 2024. We've got Nick and Chase joining us.
Patrick Baldwin: Welcome back, Chase.
Paul Giannamore: We got a ridiculous amount of inbounds after Chase's last discussion on his unorthodox approach to business and life. I’m super excited to have you as a fixture here on the show, Chase, because you can bring a ton of value. Nick, you were down here in Puerto Rico and have ramped up what you're doing in the pest control space. It's fantastic you've decided to join us as well and we're looking forward to doing some recordings with you. Chase, what's going on in North Carolina now? How's the season going?
Chase Hazelwood: I'm hearing from a lot of people that it's not been a good start but we had a huge April 2024. We're excited. Things are going nuts here. The pests are buzzing. The cicada thing is serious here in the mid-Atlantic. We've got that seventeen-year cicada thing coming out. We've got a significant amount of calls and then we're seeing all businesses ticking up massively.
I had the most profitable March 2024 of all time by a massive margin, high twenties to the bottom. We haven't seen that kind of thing before. I’m super excited about it. Those profit numbers slow down as you begin to rapidly grow in the spring but our primary objective is to hit that rapid growth number. All cylinders are clicking but we are growing very fast, lots of sales.
Paul Giannamore: What's going on with the whole cicada thing?
Chase Hazelwood: I don't know but massive numbers of cicadas are coming out. They emerge every seventeen years or something in trillions. It's already begun. It's been all over the news. It's propping up a lot of opportunities for people to be online searching or anything like that. They're not a problem pest but they do make a lot of noise at night and in the evenings and they are absolutely going nuts. You're seeing people very intrigued and interested in the pest control world. I don't know that they're looking for cicada control but it's putting pest control more top of mind.
Patrick Baldwin: Do you have the double brood? There's an 11-year, 13-year, and a 17-year and there's some places that have both. Maybe you're getting the double whammy.
Chase Hazelwood: That's it. It is massive. I've lived here my entire life and I've never seen anything like this before. They're everywhere.
Patrick Baldwin: I imagine that you're taking advantage of it.
Chase Hazelwood: Absolutely.
Paul Giannamore: Fat Pat, war in the Middle East, and cicadas in the Southeast. How's your end times clock going down there in Waco?
Patrick Baldwin: Things are good. I've not seen any bonfires recently. We're waiting for the third whammy here. That's interesting to hear, Chase. You're saying that you all have picked up a lot of business but you're hearing others that it's not the same.
Chase Hazelwood: I'm not exactly certain why it is but I've talked to some other pest control owners and they're not having the same level of success. The general thing that I hear is the tentativeness around the economy and the election year but our phones are ringing off the hook. Our sales percentages and close rates are super high and we are absolutely killing it. I'm not exactly certain if it's something to do with all our branding efforts and all our marketing. I don't know.
We track it down precisely but at the same time, I can't tell why other companies don't seem to be benefiting the same way we are. This is going to be a very large year organically. We've also got a small acquisition going. We got some door knockers hit us up and we're looking to switch from what they were doing. They were knocking somewhere and they weren't having success and we had a branch that was just starting.
We were starting from scratch with nothing and we were just out there marketing. It gives us a chance to pick up a thousand customers or something in this new market and get us off to a cashflow start that would be very helpful. That's starting. The guys I've worked with before, they called me Thursday and we moved twelve guys to the beach. We were just having a meeting with my CFO about agility and I do think that our biggest objective over the next three years is how do we maintain our agility pushing into a $25 million to $50 million company?
At the same time, you have to build all these systems and all these operational consistencies. If you've listened to me talk about that stuff before, we're extraordinarily rigid about those operational things. What we talked about is how are we agile enough to take advantage of opportunities when they come up?
I was super proud of my team. I called them and said, “You guys want to do this?” Everybody jumped all over it immediately. In fact, I thought I was going to end up doing a lot of work and I just didn't. They took over everything. We had a bunch of guys volunteer to drive down there and stay down there during the week and start to branch up and handle the new starts. I've got experienced technicians who’ve been with me for a while going out and doing new starts so it’s pretty exciting.
Nick Bartolo: Chase, you're obviously growing quickly and have a ton of investment opportunities. I'd imagine you have tons of opportunities to increase spend and increase investment, yet maintaining that profitability is also critical. How do you balance that?
Chase Hazelwood: I'm going to reveal a little vulnerability here because that's the best question that I've asked myself every day and that's probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked. Honestly, I don't have a great answer.
Nick Bartolo: Coming from Chase.
Chase Hazelwood: I don't have the right answer. If I put my people in charge of it, I know that margins will go down and I don't know that we will always get a return for it. If I give them a rigid framework and say, “I want to hit 20% to the bottom line,” they'll achieve it but if I give them this vague amorphous thing the way that I do it, which is like, “I want to make sure that we have good ROI on all of our investments. We can do this if it does this or that.” That's not going to be the deal.
What I think is the case is that entrepreneurs seem to be the only ones in their organizations when they run a small-ish company where they can make the decisions with all of the variables in mind, considering 50 different variables, different weights, and all those things. One of the things that I've had to learn is that's a type of thing that I'm going to wrestle with every single day.
We honestly met. We had this huge profit number and we went, “We don't have to have this. This is excellent. We don't have to have this. Where do we want to invest our money? Where do we want to invest the money that we made last month? Where do we want to invest the margin that projectably is going to be high in the future months?” Door knocking was one of the opportunities and we jumped all over it and we said, “This is going to cost this much money. We've got all the margin to make it happen. Let's go after it right now.”
We'd already gotten the deal going with the small acquisition that we're doing but we essentially upped our pay-per-click budgets. We upped our ad lead ad budgets. We restructured one of our departments to have a little bit more overhead and a little bit more management expense. The simplest answer to your question is 20% is an extremely healthy bottom-line number for a pest control company, Paul would be the best one to ask about acquisitions, and I just mean operating-wise. 20% is a respectable and great number. It allows you to feel safe as an owner. It makes you feel like you can stay in the business for a really long time.
What's interesting is I surveyed all my employees about how much profit we needed to make and the answer was really simple, what they thought, “As much as you need to stay as our leader. When it becomes not profitable enough for you to be here, we don't want that. We want you here and we want you engaged,” which I thought was fascinating. I never expected that but they were thinking of it like, “If the profit drops, he's going to sell the company.” That's what they were thinking. I never considered that and I never said it but that was interesting.
It empowered me a little bit to go after those types of things. I targeted 20%. We get way over 20% like we did in March and we went, “Wow. How much of this is systemic? How much of this is one time?” We thought $95,000 of our profit was one-time. The rest we thought was systemic, we took that out, we mapped it back down, and we went, “We still got multiple points that we could give into overhead to make running this business easier, less stressful, and more adaptable to the future so we're making all those moves.”
Nick Bartolo: That's interesting.
Chase Hazelwood: Chase Does that answer the question?
Nick Bartolo: It does. It is a hard question. It reminds me of some of the earlier comments you had in that response is what gets measured gets managed. You said, “If I give them that 20% target, they're going to hit it.” Oftentimes, in successful businesses, any types of business, trying to either minimize or maximize certain variables can be extremely profitable or extremely effective. Amazon is always trying to bring down costs and bring down prices, The same with Costco, and things like that. With pest control though, to me, thinking about unit economics is very much like profitability and net present value of each customer is one of the key metrics to measure.
I'm curious, to extend on that question, is that something that you really hone in on because it does. If you know every customer you acquire is worth X and you're continuing to spend and earn a good ROI on that spend relative to that lifetime value of the customer, are you able to actually hone it in that fine of a manner?
Chase Hazelwood: There are two answers. I'll give you the answer to your specific question and then I'll say what I think works out for us. The specific answer to your question is we do track return on ad spend, which we call ROAS. It's a retention-based concept. How much money do we spend to acquire the customer advertising wise? How long do we keep customers that find us through that avenue? What is the gross margin on the service type? We can average out, “You bought a quarterly service. This is how long people that keep the quarterly, keep the quarterly.” We run it on a business intelligence software so we factor in if those people buy another service, it bumps it up.
Over the course of a period of time, we sell, on average, a 5X ROAS for lead generation services. You get a 5X ROAS that's in the month. Over the next two years, we will have a tendency to increase that ROAS as we sell a secondary service and a third service. That ROAS, return on ad spend, is a multiple of how much money we spend on advertising versus the lifetime value gross margin of the customer. All of that said, we do track the number of customers that we acquire, we track how profitable they are, but not on an individual basis. We track them on an average per customer basis.
Nick Bartolo: I figured if anyone was doing it, it was you.
Chase Hazelwood: Yeah. What we want to know is how often we have to retreat a customer, each customer type, what is the gross margin? We have a 65% target for gross margin, that's cost of goods, cost of material, and retreats included. We also track out inside the 35% costs or the branch rent costs like rent on the branch and a couple of other branch specific things. That 65% gross margin gets used to cover HR, overhead, and sales expenses. The sales commissions come out of the 35%. That's kind of your target in the very beginning.
The second part of that is we treat our minimum is the amount of growth that we're going to achieve and we break that down into a growth percentage then we reverse engineer it by the number of sales that we do of each service type. We say, “Is this feasible?” Sometimes it's not so we're not going to sell but so many mosquito services, I don't know. We will increase one or decrease the other. We turn that into a number then we turn it into a number per week and we have a sales number per week.
If we don't hit that sales number, we change everything. When you turn in your KPI number, it breaks down per region, per technician, and per branch. If a branch is supposed to do twelve Sentricons this week in that branch, if they don't hit their twelve, the branch manager in his KPI report will say, “This is what I'm going to do next week to fix this.” That number is not 12 for 52 weeks, it's 4 per week in December and January and we just ratio it out over the course of the year based on the region and how many services they sell by the technicians throughout the year. What it does is it makes everything very manageable and it shortens the timeline from a year to a month.
Tracking the number of sales is something I learned from door-to-door guys that I don't know why we didn't do it before, we always track dollars. What would happen is if you go sell a big moisture control job, your month would look incredible. If you do a crawl space encapsulation or something for $10,000 or $20,000, you're like, “Yeah, this is amazing.” The next month, it was terrible and you would miss out on this.
Today, those numbers get tracked in one spot but if you think about how much we track all the numbers that we do, obviously, the number of sales is the number one thing. We have our number of sales that is the minimum requirement and we're going to scramble. We're going to do anything it takes to make it happen.
The secondary thing is how do we make money? If these scrambles are working but they're costing us too much money, then we start figuring that out but it's iterative, if that makes sense, and it starts with a minimum standard. We have to sell $2,350 accounts this month not including door-to-door, that's how many we have to sell. If we don't sell 500 in the first week, we know we're off base and we've got to scramble and start fixing it.
Paul Giannamore: Nick, a minute ago, Chase mentioned he had talked to some other folks in the industry and maybe demand was a little bit muted. We're in the middle of earning the season and you can't help but look at Starbucks reported declining same store sales. We saw iPhone sales roll over 10%. There's a lot behind that story. What are you seeing in the earning reports that might speak to customer demand across the spectrum of goods and services?
Nick Bartolo: What we've seen, as you know, over the past year or a year and half is more of an industrial or goods recession. Everybody was calling for a recession and has been over 2022 and even throughout 2023. In terms of a broad-based recession, that never happened. However, globally, you have had this industrial recession, in my opinion, and the numbers support that.
At the same time, services or a lot of consumer-oriented spending has been quite strong. You can go back to COVID, you can go back to the fiscal stimulus, and you can also just go back to consumer balance sheets that have been tremendously strong over that period. However, it's been a while now. We're multiple years into this. What you have happening now is you have this industrial recession that's turned the corner and bottomed. A lot of that is the nature of lapping easy comparisons.
Global industrial production is improving and you're also seeing that out of some of the numbers in Europe, Germany in particular. To your question, a bit of a long-winded answer, now we're seeing some of this consumer weakness. McDonald's had some weaker than expected results and Starbucks, as you mentioned, as well.
I remember covering Starbucks and the restaurants back in 2006 and 2007 and restaurants are typically on the front-end of consumer trends in that they start to roll over when you have a weakening consumer environment well before others just considering how discretionary they are. Someone's not going to cancel their pest control but they might not go get that $100 latte. They're probably up to that right now.
Paul Giannamore: They will be.
Patrick Baldwin: I've read that wage growth is higher than inflation. Did you see that?
Nick Bartolo: Yeah. Wage growth is running around 4%. Wage growth is strong, which if it does exceed inflation, that means spending power is going up or purchasing power and even discretionary income is going up. The macroeconomic environment globally is one of the most complex systems and problems to think about, which is frankly not solvable. That's why I operate under the underlying premise that the future is uncertain.
You try to make probabilistic judgments based on what you're seeing but ultimately, it's an extremely complex issue. Wage growth has been good, which is good for people, which we all want. Frankly, that's been a problem I would say over the past 20 or 30 years that's caused some societal unrest in some factions. We don't want to get too into that right now. Wage growth, at that level, is also inflationary. If you have high wage growth, people then have more money to spend, they have more things that they can buy, and that pushes up the prices of goods.
This inflation that we've been wanting to subside doesn't happen. The related action by the Fed to cut rates doesn't happen. The result of that is everybody's paying more on their new mortgage if they go to buy a house. They're paying more to finance vehicles. They're paying more on capital expenditures if they're going to open a branch location. That's the environment that I'm seeing right now.
Patrick Baldwin: Chase, to you, everything that Nick just said, how does that impact? I know you study. You're keeping your finger on the pulse of the economy. You've got an acquisition on one hand and you've got an opportunity to put guys on the doors on the other. You're thinking about consumer spending, how does this affect either of those decisions?
Chase Hazelwood: I'm constantly looking at it. I try not to let it completely dominate my decisions. I look for validation in what our consumers are trying to do. I do see plenty of news around inflation and around the economy slowing down and things but I'm going to be honest, we're not seeing it at all. Wage inflation is real and I think that we are the beneficiaries in the service industry. We're the first group.
We just raised current customer prices 4% and then we raised our price for new services an average of like 12% or 11%. When you buy a service today, you're paying 12% more than two weeks ago if you bought the same service. I do think that that is completely absorbed. It's not like there's no consumer reaction to it, which is always baffling to our salespeople. They think, “This is the end of the world. You're raising our prices.” There's no reaction.
The thing that I was thinking about when you were talking, Nick, and I wanted to ask everybody on the panel but do you guys think that the wage inflation, in this case, comes as a trailer trailing as we had a massive industrial inflation and we had cost of goods going through the roof? We then had companies making record profits and now we just have wage inflation trailing those two things. Do you think that it's some other factors that are maybe leading to it?
Nick Bartolo: What I would say is that the labor market is still ultra tight. Unemployment is still 3.8%. When you have that type of scarcity in the labor market, that should lead to higher wage growth, all else equal. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, Paul.
Paul Giannamore: It's clearly related to the tightness in the labor market. Also, if you parse Fed statements closely, there's always the talk of whether or not inflation is anchored or unanchored. The best indicator of future inflation is inflation today. You have expectations related to where inflation is going to be and that often starts to show up in wages, especially in a tight labor market where you have bargaining. I tend to look at this, though, in the same lens that you do, Nick, which is when you've got a tight labor work market, workers have the ability to bargain. You've got to increase wages in order to get the employees.
Nick Bartolo: Business owners, overall, whether it's small or large businesses, remember very acutely and are still likely experiencing it how hard it was to hire the people that they actually have. The last thing they want to do is not increase their wage enough and lose them to a competitor. That's a factor. That's a by-product of the tight labor market. We've seen extremes over the past 3 to 5 years when it comes to this topic.
Patrick Baldwin: Nick, I know you have clients in California, they just increase their minimum wage $20 an hour for these large chains. I don't know if you've seen an impact in the service industry where that's directly forcing, “I could go work in a lower-end air-conditioned job, easier, and lower entry compared to more of a skilled labor set.” I don't know if you've seen anything where direct costs are going up because of it.
Nick Bartolo: Most folks working in pest control are well above that level at this point anyway. Correct me if I'm wrong here but that's $40,000, $20 an hour. They're well above that. Chase's people, with his incentives, they’re printing money over there.
Patrick Baldwin: I've seen there's a lot more turnover when they're trying to battle against the minimum wage crowd, like, “How do I keep employees on staff?” I thought about going to work for Chase.
Chase Hazelwood: I always think the hardest thing is not that we're paying close to minimum wage or if competitors raise how much they're paying. It's usually the simplicity of the job or lower expectation or the idea that we're expecting a level of ownership or even integrity or having lesser oversight. For example, you might have at another organization, there's a gas station right down the road for all of COVID and then up was $14 or $16 an hour on the front of the sign on the place. Now, it's back down. The sign still there but now it says $12 and something an hour. I've been very curious and I've asked but it's a corporate chain and nobody there knows why they're doing it.
Nick is right on. Any small business, the people that are making the decisions, once you improve benefits or improve labor pay, you're not going to see those people be like, “Let's go back to a cheaper way of doing it.” They're constantly going to think, “This is the minimum standard.” They're thinking, “I don't want to lose these people.”
Many companies were hurt very badly right after COVID financially from not having enough staff. Many companies sold out or got out of the business at that time. Right now, the idea is simply, “It's not the end of the world. We can find people but let's make sure they're getting enough money.” This might just be me but it always feels like there's plenty of opportunity. There's so much business out there. We just need to solve these problems and great employees obviously make solving those problems so much easier.
Patrick Baldwin: Chase, you said earlier you did end up adding management. You're like, “This is going to take some investment but I'm going to put more management in place.” What kind of decision did you arrive? I don't know who you hired there or what their role is but this all goes together.
Chase Hazelwood: We're in the Eastern part of the country, the mid-Atlantic, so Eastern subterraneans are a big deal. When I say a big deal, I mean a huge part of our profit comes from Eastern sub treatments and warranties and service agreements. We originally had branch managers that essentially were responsible for the operations and the sales of pest control, commercial pest control, and the termite work, as you would call it.
We have now broken all the termite ops out into its own division, they're still underneath the branch manager's eyesight, and they're working out of the branch, but there is a division leader that's based here in Greensboro that is overseeing all the divisions. We got crazy with it and we made four regions. There are three regions for pest control and there are four regions for our termite control based on where we get a lot of work.
We hired a regional manager for every one of those regions for termite control. It added a significant amount of overhead. However, the idea was we wanted to make each region more autonomous and put less pressure on the branch manager and then have the expertise at the highest level closest to me and closest to the COO so that we can have the greatest level of impact.
Our entire flywheel is built on the idea that we're going to sell you pest control, we're going to build a relationship, and we're going to sell you termite control. Because we do such a great job at termite control, we're not going to have damage claims and warranty claims. We're then going to make profit off of keeping your service for a really long time. That's the entire flywheel. We're going to take that money and spend it to acquire more customers.
If we don't do great termite control, everything breaks down and that requires expertise but most of all, quality control. Somebody has got to look over all these guys' shoulders. That's how we chose to invest all the extra money. We're currently out recruiting regional termite directors that it would be over top of 2 to 3 or 4 branches in a physical region and they'll be out in the field working all day, checking houses, crawling underneath houses, making sure jobs are done right, observing diagrams, and all those types of things.
Do we do a detailed diagram or detailed information? Do we have enough information to do the job correctly? How should we treat the house managing the equipment? How many times have you been out somewhere? People have equipment on trucks and they don't work, especially termite equipment. All of those things were a factor in us deciding to spend the money that way, which is interesting because in general, the majority of my overhead, I spend it on acquiring new customers. In this case, we felt like it was such an identifier for who we are. The quality of termite treatments is vital.
Nick Bartolo: Effectively, you're spending it on retention, right?
Chase Hazelwood: That's exactly right.
Nick Bartolo: It’s such a powerful variable.
Chase Hazelwood: In termite control, termite warranties, we have a 9.5-year retention on a termite warranty, which is the best in our service offerings. I'll never forget our executive team was like, “Are we really sure?” I was like, “I've constantly said let's be the best at this. Let's just be the best. I'm 100% in the belief that this is going to actually make us better. Even if we're the best, we can still be better. Let's chase perfection. Along the way, we'll catch excellence.” Dennis Lombardi quote there. The idea here is like, “This is a better way to do this.” Everybody agreed it's a better way, “It's going to cost this much money.”
In the end, my goal is how do I pay for it? First off, we had some profit. My goal is our optimization would be that the branch managers can now focus on pest control, operations, quality control, and sales. How can they generate tremendously more sales? They don't have to worry about how the termite jobs get done. They don't have to worry about those types of things. Now they can focus on, “Are we doing quality? Can we get better retention on pest control? Can we get better sales out of our pest control techs? Can we sell more termite treatments?”
Also, I don't have to worry about getting the jobs done. If I sell more and they back up on somebody else, it's still not my problem. I still don't have to worry about it. Go sell, sell, sell, sell, and sell. In the end, if we can remove obstacles, the overall goal is maybe we can grow even faster. It's going to cost us but my bet is that it's not going to take almost any of that profit long-term. My bet is that we accelerate and we increase our profit in other areas because of our increase in that free time gives us, if that makes any sense.
Patrick Baldwin: How and when are you going to measure if that was the right play? Two weeks? I know you keep a short leash over there.
Chase Hazelwood: It's an awesome challenge. The first part is there is a challenge but it's simple, it is these quality control metrics that we put in place. Essentially, there was quality control, “Do we make this mistake, this mistake, and this mistake?” This is how we catch it and this is how we measure it. The elimination of these mistakes and then the increase of the quality controls up to a certain percentage, which we track every single week and we measure it every month. We started investing the money right after March 2024.
We already made the division president happen and all that stuff. That's already paying off. We're going to get that. We're going to measure it but we're going to get there. In three months, it'll be done. I'm 100% convinced. However, the part I just talked about, that is a fantastic idea to measure whether or not we've increased. We should have higher expectations for those branch managers. I bet that my COO will be like, “You're 100% right. Let's increase the expectations for the year and let's begin measuring it right away.” We weren't able to hire four regional managers all at once. We've only successfully hired 2 of the 4 regions. At this point, it's not fully implemented but that's a fantastic challenge.
Patrick Baldwin: I don't know if I gave you an idea but I'm taking credit for whatever you just came up with on your own.
Nick Bartolo: Tell them to call Fat Pat if they don't like it.
Chase Hazelwood: I'm going to let them know. That's a million-dollar idea. With the rest of your time, why can't you do this? You're no longer observing termite treatments and everything else. They're going to love you.
Patrick Baldwin: I don't know what I just got myself into.
Chase Hazelwood: I thought you would come in and do a presentation and talk with all the managers, “This is my idea. I’m just letting you know.”
Patrick Baldwin: My talent pretty much stops at the truffle shuffle. That's all I'm good for.
Chase Hazelwood: Goals are going up 50%.
Nick Bartolo: What is that?
Chase Hazelwood: The truffle shuffle.
Patrick Baldwin: From Goonies.
Nick Bartolo: I don't remember that part. I remember the movie but not that part.
Chase Hazelwood: You know it so you can show us right now.
Patrick Baldwin: No. Now that we're recording a video, I'm going to pass but thank you. Maybe we can play the clip. We're talking about this whole labor and costing. I've come and visited you twice since we recorded your infamous episode 162. You have made some changes in terms of relocating people in different positions and also having different division managers and branch managers go. As you're thinking through that, what costs do you associate with turnover like in a mid-manager role?
Chase Hazelwood: This is going to get me in trouble. I don't think turnover costs anywhere near what these people claim it costs at all. Turnover is very good and very healthy. If you don't have turnover, you're not asking your people to be the best versions of themselves because if you were, people would quit. Of course, they would.
It's ridiculous that we measure turnover as a negative thing. You should measure performance. You should measure whether or not you're having a meritocracy. You should measure how much you pay your people. You should measure all those things. Are we given enough benefits? We pay for all of it. You get a personal trainer online. We have our own app. You go through the app, you get a personal trainer, and you get customized training, physical therapy. Whatever the hell you need, we pay for it. We rolled that thing out. The only person using it right now is me. There are a couple of others.
Patrick Baldwin: What did I say to your trainer that day?
Chase Hazelwood: I don't remember.
Patrick Baldwin: I said, “Chase said the workout this morning was easy.”
Chase Hazelwood: She's been pretty mean since you said that.
Patrick Baldwin: You're welcome.
Chase Hazelwood: That's really funny. Our objective, realistically, is to hold them to a very high standard. If and when these people ever leave, I always tell them, “You're going to be better prepared for whatever job you ever go into, no matter what.” 100% of people tell me that, they're like, “The standards that go forth were so high when I went to work somewhere else, it was a lot easier.” I'm not sure that turnover is such a bad thing.
Since January 2024, we've lost roughly a third of the mid-level management inside of our company. That's the way that you say it. We parted ways, one way or the other, and we made the largest profit we've ever made in March 2024 and it was astounding and staggering. Our growth rate dramatically turned. A lot of people that were in those positions, we didn't let them go and they didn't quit. We repositioned them into a position that fits them better than where they were.
Turnover offers each of your employees an opportunity to look up and think, “That's not permanent. I could be there one day.” Growth does the same thing so you want that as well. Turnover can be negative. We lost a lot of experience on the termite department and that's part of the reason why we have to change. That's part of the deal. We lost a ton of experienced technicians and we had to figure out something better.
What if we don't have these experienced technicians? You got to figure it out. However, the idea that turnover costs $20,000 an employee, if it does, it also increases a lot of stuff. It allows you to retrain and start from scratch. You got bad habits that get out the door and you get to rebuild. I'm sure it costs a lot of money. However, I generally just don't see it as a big negative. Losing people who are pissed off at you is a negative.
People that are upset with me or with the people here, that's a negative. People leaving, good for you. Most of my people, I prepare them for something amazing and then they go work in some other amazing place and do great things and we stay connected forever. They go do amazing things and I'm so proud that I could be even a tiny part of their journey. Why would that be a negative? Why would that not be the most positive thing?
Every single entrepreneur reading and every single one that comes on this podcast is thinking, “I want to keep my people forever.” Sure, you do, unless they have incredible, amazing opportunities ahead of them that they could go do even better things in life. Plus, what are we doing here? I don't know. I'm thinking grandiosely. I want to change the world somehow, well, I can't. Do it by killing bugs. Sometimes, I can hopefully do it by people becoming better than the job I hired him for and I don't have a job that fits them anymore but they can move on and they can go find something amazing.
Typically, I have a couple of lunches a month with ex-employees. Not all of them are invited but there are many and they're doing amazing things and I cannot be more proud that I was a part of that. I was worried about people judging me on the fact that I don't say I don't mind losing people but there are lots of great reasons for people to leave. By the way, if I cannot enrich your life in the next year, I do not think you should work for me. I mean enrich your life spiritually, physically, mentally, or financially, or maybe all of the above. If I can't enrich you, why would you even consider working here? That's not even a realistic relationship. Let's move on.
Paul Giannamore: Chase, to your point, Jim McHale was on the show and he talked about how he makes sure he calls 10% of his workforce every year. There's forced attrition. At least 10% are not going to be doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're out.
Chase Hazelwood: I don't, in any way, disagree with that. I would never have to set a number because it's not a problem. I took about a year off, worked in private equity, and tried to run some companies and it was a lot different than I thought it was going to be, it was a lot harder in a lot of ways. When I came back, I realized now everyone felt empowered to go get it done and that's how a lot of this turnover happened.
A lot of this turnover happened because I came in and was like, “Let's go.” Everybody was like, “Yeah.” A few people were like, “I don't know, maybe.” They then found their way out the door. I will say, I don't think we have too much of a problem with that. Our standards are very high. There are so many places that need someone to show up breathing that this is a hard place to work compared to those places. A decent chunk of people are going to leave.
I'd also say, if you grow really fast, you can hire a lot of people. If we grow 20% this 2024, we've got to add 30 new positions. If we had 30 new positions this 2024, how many of those people are going to work out? If somebody is doing better than 50% nailing it, they're amazing. We only want to have people stay that we nailed it on. You hire 30 and you get 15 gone and then you hire those 15 and you got 7 gone, etc. You end up having a decent amount of turnover. Plus, hopefully, the other 150 people that you have, hopefully, there are a few of those people that have grown personally faster than we had the opportunity for them. They got to go too because they're going to have better places to move on to.
Nick Bartolo: They might not get the personal trainer and all that too. You're running a technology company over there with those perks.
Chase Hazelwood: I had a buddy of mine who was an engineer, had a master's degree, was a smart dude, and he was like, “I hate my job. I hate working here.” He had lots of reasons. I was like, “Why don't you leave?” He was like, “I have to change my phone number. I got my work phone.” That's the first thing out of his mouth. I was like, “Holy smokes.” This guy that could have any job anywhere, he's thinking about his phone number.
The next week, we bought iPhones for everybody. The next week, I bought iPhones for all my employees. The call center people had iPhones. That was not a good idea. In case anybody reading is like, “I'm going to buy.” Don't do that. That was a bad idea. That was over the top. I overdid that. At the end of the day, I do think it matters. I'm scrambling around looking for benefits that somebody feels like they can't leave and they can't let go.
In the ideal world, some guy comes home from work, and I tell my employees this, and they have a terrible day and it's the type of day worth quitting over. You go to your wife and you go, “I'm quitting.” She says, “honey, that's terrible but you've lost so much weight. They've got the wellness program. Why don't you give it another day? Give it another day. See how it is tomorrow.” If there's anybody that could take a few minutes on our team because everybody's going to have that day worth quitting over, every single one of us have that day.
What you need is you need another person on your team so that's why we have the suite at the Panthers or the Charlotte FC or whatever and we have them take their wives. I've never understood the idea that we only take employees. I’m always like, “Bring your wife. Bring your kid. Let's go.” I want them to bring their wife and their kid and then be like, “You can't quit that job.2 We had the suite tickets.” I'm trying to create a second thinking moment to be like, “I had a crap day. This sucks. I hate my job.”
There's a little bit extra to it, a little bit of bribery to be like, “I know it sucks today but it doesn't suck every day and there's this other thing here that's awesome.” That's my goal. If we could do it in a way that's healthy, spiritually, physically, mentally, and all those things, obviously that's great. All the pest control guys reading, you guys have all employed people that started a pest control route and lost a ton of weight. Guys lose weight.
How do we get credit for that? We don't. They just walk around and spray bugs. What if you run a wellness program at the same time? Do you give them advice and everything else? Their wife is like, “There is a wellness program.” He's like, “No but I’m walking around the house.” She's like, “There's a wellness program and they try to help.” At least that's where my head's at. Maybe I could tie into that a little bit. Maybe I could make them recognize that walking around that house those 3 or 4 times makes it a healthy job for them.
Patrick Baldwin: Why was giving iPhones to the call center people a bad idea?
Chase Hazelwood: One reason is because it was an incredible waste of money. The second reason was that they didn't need them in any capacity. The other reason was because they started, like, “I got a phone call or I got an email on my iPhone so I clocked in this morning at 5:30 or something,” and you're like, “No, I got to have this discussion with you about that.” It was just completely not worth it. It didn't inhibit them significantly from leaving.
Paul Giannamore: They're sitting at their phones after all. They're sitting at desks with phones.
Chase Hazelwood: That's exactly right. I will say that's a typical Chase thing to do is like, “One of these is great so 10 of them will be 10 times as good. Let's go.” It doesn't always work out that way.
Patrick Baldwin: You did talk about reappropriating or moving your managers into the right seats. Ryan was previously running your call center and now he's the hub of all your operations. His name is Ryan, right? What is his name?
Chase Hazelwood: His name's Josh.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm sorry.
Chase Hazelwood: Josh was running my call center and now we created a new position for him and the position he's in now is process improvement director or manager. His job is to take anything that we do and improve the process. For example, he found this AI tool that will take any task you do in a computer and create an SOP for it along with a training video and audio. Every single time we go to do anything new or we're going to show someone how to do it or we train them, we create the SOP. Now, the employees can review the SOP in their free time so that they're prepped before training begins.
Other examples might be the script that we use when we answer the phone and try to sell services. He literally builds the script through whatever software we're using. He does all the software integration stuff. Anything that's a process that we are doing, his job is to review it and improve it. He is phenomenally talented. The call center manager, he was good at that too but this takes him from an area where he was good to an area where he is an absolute all-star. If I can do that and that I can find someone who's good or an all-star at running the call center, then I've raised the bar across the board.
I love working with Josh but I love the mission of what he's doing. Whatever we're doing, I want to make it better. This guy is literally getting paid to go out and find crap we're doing that we could improve on. Spraying for bugs is difficult but it's kind of like an art. There's a science obviously to it for sure. It’s like, “This guy prefers this or this guy prefers that.”
That's not where I'm talking about improving the process. I'm talking about how do we approve expenses? How do our managers use their credit cards or anything like that that's on the corporate level? How do we simplify or reduce extra work or duplicate entry? He's opened up the API in our software and has it to where our script now directly loads customers into our database. He's got an AI answering the phones now that can interact with you and discuss stuff with you and those types of things. Any process that we're doing, he's looking at improving it or changing it or taking away and making it better.
Paul Giannamore: How did you hire that guy? Where did the process improvement guy come from?
Chase Hazelwood: He was originally with another company. He'd been with them for a long time and moved into their office. The management was running their call center and that kind of thing and left them to come to work for my PE company, the private equity company, and worked in process improvement in the private equity company. I just pulled him straight out of there. I found this area where this guy is an absolute stud. If you lead a little deeper into your question, it's like, How do you surround yourself with an incredible team?”
My wife is my wife and she's a badass and she's amazing at all of those things and she's the mother of my four kids and runs the house and everything but she also is this incredible marketing person who runs all of our marketing and runs the marketing company. Go Forth marketing is its own company. We have 18 or 19 employees doing nothing but marketing and they do it for all sorts of companies and not just Go Forth. She runs all of that. She's the lead strategist and marketer for that. How did I find her? I married her. I hit a home run on that one of multiple fronts.
The majority of this is our number one job as CEOs is culture and that means your main objective has to be recruiting the top talent and that might mean recruiting from inside. That means you've got to meet all your employees and you've got to know who the talent is. That's a big ask, by the way. Number two is you've got to continually be out in the marketplace recruiting, working, pushing, finding great people, and connecting with them. That means networking at other events, moving into alternative areas, and looking for really talented people.
I never turned down an interview. I get referrals sometimes. I try to interview anybody because I'm always interested and intrigued. I want to make sure that I'm staying connected. The other piece of it is I'm more opportunistic than I think most entrepreneurs. The process improvement thing is made up. I don't know anybody that has one.
We brought him in and he did all this stuff exceptionally and we went, “What if we just did this all the time?” He was like, “I'd love that.” It was like, “Okay.” That's the answer to your question, Paul. If you look into details about where these people come from, most of my senior team is from within. There are people that have worked their way up in the organization and I've built relationships with them. Dennis, our COO, for example, started with me when he was 17. He was making %12 an hour or maybe $10 when he came to work here so he's been here this whole time and now he's absolutely running the show here.
My VP of HR, she was recruited directly. However, I say that's not exactly true. She reached out to us. We went to best places to work. We'd won one of those best places to work things. She reached out to us and said, “I've heard so many things about you. I've read about you in the TVB, the Triad Business Journal, and I am reaching out to let you know that if you ever have any needs, I'd love to sit down and talk to you guys.”
She was an absolute stud. She's phenomenal. She's the VP of HR. I hired her for our HR director and now she runs HR for the vast majority of my organizations and companies. You get that from networking and going to those events. I consider recruiting the battleground of our day. It's all about fighting for the best talent. I also don't think that we're in a closed system. We're not just recruiting pest control people, we're recruiting from all the industries.
If you look at it from that perspective, it makes us slightly easier because you're like, “I'm going to go get the absolute best that I can find. I'm going to work all day and work all evening on this. I'm going to constantly be at these events.” A lot of people see networking as selling pest control. If you go to networking and you sell two pest control services, a big job, that's great but it's not the most important thing in the world. We have 42,000 under contract or whatever. That didn't make a dent. If you find the new VP of HR, it's a total game changer, can be.
Patrick Baldwin: How did you backfill your call center? That's a critical piece. I hear more and more about, “How do I run a call center? Do I run a call center with customer service and sales together? With what you have going there, a key leader in your business, pulling Josh out left you in a void.
Chase Hazelwood: It did. What we did was we divided the call center into all the different categories and duties and looked at them separately. We took our call center staff that handled our HVAC plumbing calls along with our admin. The people that take HVAC calls are sort of just scheduling. They're not selling much over the phone. We took all those people and we called them admin. This is anybody that does data entry or anybody that does something less customer service oriented, let's just say.
We put them in one room and we went back and recruited someone who was more talented than we had a position for her and went to work at Bank of America, slaughtered it for years, and then we kept in touch. We stayed in touch this whole time and then we stole her back. Bank of America invested some money into making her even more kick ass. Now, I'm the beneficiary and she come back and we were so excited and she's running all of our admin team. Now, we have an admin manager and she's running the admin team. That left us with two thirds of our call center.
We changed the name of the organization from call center or something to sales center and we left our customer retention and our sales team for the sales center. We did what everybody always does, we took our top performer, interviewed the top couple of performers, and hired one of them on an interim basis. We told her, “We're going to hire you for an interim. There are 90 or 120 days.” We said, “We're going to go out and recruit but we're not going to look for a call center director. We're going to look for someone and we think you're well suited for this job.”
“We're going to pay you for the 90 to 120 days. We're going to make sure you're compensated and everything. We're going to give you a good trial. We're going to help you. We're not going to throw it all at you. We're going to ease you into this and make sure that this works. If we find somebody amazing along the way, they're going to be your boss. They're going to get hired for this. However, at the very least, this gives you exposure to these new ideas and at the end of it, we'll carve out some kind of position for you, I make sure that you get compensated.” Her job is not as autonomous and independent as Josh was. She is being managed by the COO.
The COO and as well as the VP CFO or any of the executive leadership team, we give them three types of roles with regards to their direct reports. One is managing, the other is leadership, and the other is delegating to a leader. Those are the three types of roles that you can have. Management is knowing how someone does something. They have to control and they control how it's being done. Right now, she is being managed by the COO, Dennis. He is controlling how she does things. She's reporting back to him, “This is what I'm doing.” “That's good. This is not good. Don't do this. Do this.” In the long run, that position will not be managed, it will be led.
The leadership is you explain, “Why do we have to do great things? Why are we here in business?” You then tell them what we want to accomplish and they decide who and how. That's how you lead someone. If you delegate for someone else to lead, typically, you're going to help them decide who, and you're going to tell them and maybe they're going to decide what you're going to tell them why. There's some kind of combination of all those questions.
What we typically do is we'll have somebody write down the new position and we have Dennis write out, “What is her responsibility? What's your responsibility to her?” He's like, “This is a management position. I'm managing her.” For the new termite division that I talked about earlier, that leader, he is being led. He's not being managed.
Dennis doesn't know what time he comes in in the morning. He doesn't know what time he leaves. He knows what his objectives are and he knows that he's going to accomplish it along the right path because he's given him the why and he's given him all the details of the why. This is the general idea of what we're trying to accomplish and go out there and make it happen. Regards to this call center employee, this is a management position. Do all those phases kind of make sense?
Patrick Baldwin: I didn't understand the third tier. There's a managed lead and what's the third one?
Chase Hazelwood: You're going to delegate a project to someone and say, “I'm delegating this project to you. You are going to get a team together and you're going to accomplish this and you're going to be a leader.” I'm going to give you a lot more parameters than I would in the leadership mindset. I'm going to give you outcomes, maybe tasks along the way. It's sort of a hybrid. It's like a mix. At the end of the day, your accountability is going to be measured more task-oriented than outcome-oriented but you're going to measure both.
In leadership, you're measuring outcomes. In management, you're measuring tasks. If you're managing someone and you're managing their outcomes, you're doing it wrong. You should be managing their tasks. If you have a salesman and they turn in great numbers and you're managing that salesman, you should be asking, “What is the activity level? Could he be doing double the sales that he is doing now if you managed him more properly?” Generally, what happens is sales guys talk you into not managing them and to leading them and that's fine too if that's your preference but leading them just means you're telling them the general what they have to accomplish and then you're letting them do it relatively autonomously.
Patrick Baldwin: We see that a lot on the technician side. We think about technicians moving into the service managers because they're the highest performers. I'm sure you knew that and thought about that before you decided to pull Josh and put him in the new role. I'm going to make up another name and let's call her Crystal, that's your number one sales center. Was that close with her name this time?
Chase Hazelwood: No, her name is Brittany.
Patrick Baldwin: Dang it. I feel like I don't even know you all anymore.
Nick Bartolo: Chase, you know what I've been thinking about hearing you talk about this system and these roles and your team? This may be a little unfair, you might not remember saying this but the last time you were on, you said, “My people, they don't trust me and I don't trust them.” Do you remember saying that?
Chase Hazelwood: Yep.
Nick Bartolo: To me, this whole mosaic of what you're talking about is that you have a high trust culture. I could be wrong. You have that trust but you just have incentives that are structured well. You have high expectations and you have metrics. It seems like within that system, trust is very high and not low, which, to me, always leads to a better culture and better performance. Is that fair or am I totally off base?
Chase Hazelwood: You're giving me a chance to save myself from my own mouth last time. It is fair. We say things like that here. We say things about the trust. In reality, what we're really trying to insinuate is there has to be a verification to whatever and there's got to be accountability because the people that are here, they do trust me. What they trust me to do is to hold everybody accountable and to be excellent.
I had a meeting with the CFO and we were talking about another one of our people, Niki. We were talking about how she has the expectation that I surround her with talented people. If I don't, it's very disappointing. It's disappointing for her if people can't live up to or can't perform at the standard. The expectation is and the trust is that when I put someone in place, they're going to be competent to be able to do their job. She's completely awesome.
You're right about trust. It probably depends on how you define the word. When I say that, you know what I'm doing. I'm going for shock value. I tell my people that because I tell them, “I'm tired of you telling me that you trust these guys. Don't trust them. That's so ridiculous. Catch him doing it right then.” If you trust him or her, catch them doing it correctly. At the end of the day, that gives you all the more opportunity to publicly acknowledge them and all of that kind of stuff.
I don't want to feel like my employees trust me. I want to feel that I have earned their respect and I want to feel like that I am very insanely consistent in my performance. If I can do that, it'll manifest itself as trust but I would love to say that they're going to check their paycheck. I hope they always check their paycheck. They could trust that I wouldn't do it intentionally but I hope that they live in a verification culture. It's okay for us to double check what they do and it's totally okay for them to double check what I do.
Nick, what I meant was it's okay to double check. It's okay to catch me doing it right. It's okay for us to catch you doing it right. It's almost like permission to have accountability to each other. I appreciate you saying that because I listened to the podcast again and I went, “I'm not sure that that came out exactly how I wanted.”
Patrick Baldwin: Did you all stage this beforehand? You all talk about this?
Nick Bartolo: We rehearsed.
Chase Hazelwood: It's amazing.
Patrick Baldwin: You said some amazing things about Leah on this one too. Good job, Chase.
Chase Hazelwood: I couldn't do it without her. It's not even possible. We are rebranding currently. We're Go Forth pest control and we're rebranding as Go Forth Home Services because we've integrated plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and then we also do smart homes and access controls and things like that. As part of that process, Go Forth marketing is out there having to lead the way, developing a marketing plan, a program, TV ads, radio, and all that kind of stuff.
Of course, we own a soccer team and a coffee shop and all this other stuff that you guys have been here for. We've begun to be branded. We're not just transactional going out and get leads. Maybe you want that to be the case. In the ideal world, we're going to build brand recognition and people are going to look for us and then we'll become a household name. That's the idea behind sponsoring the soccer teams and all the other stuff.
Patrick Baldwin: I was just personally curious how she's performing because you had her in a hybrid role. She was still having to perform as your number one salesperson the way you have your batting order and manage the other salespeople. Is she stepping up to the expectation?
Chase Hazelwood: She's doing extraordinarily well being managed. The long-term question is going to be, how much is Dennis going to be able to step away? How much is he going to be able to lead her? That's a long-term question. She's exceeding my expectations massively. She came in and said, “This person is not a good fit.” That takes a lot of courage to do that. You have to deal with our process for how we deal with someone who's not a good fit, which is pretty tedious.
We're going to make you communicate well and put everything in writing and get HR involved and make sure that the person has a fair chance. I've said this before but I will say that I don't think that there is a greater sense of pride for anyone that owns a business than when they bring their son or daughter in to try to interview for a job. Maybe other people are different but I cannot feel more proud when somebody refers a relative and they come into work, especially a son or daughter. April's son applied for a job and I'm ecstatic.
If you look at that call center, which is now the sales center, they came up with a grandiose title. It's like the sales center for excellence or something. The end goal is to be this place that's fantastic to work at and fantastic to interact with each other. I don't really think call centers are known for that. If we can be the sales center for excellence, it will be phenomenal. I’m terribly excited about it. I'm super excited about Jake, April’s son, and all the other new hires that we have.
You guys have been to the office. We have a coffee shop in the building with the baristas and then guests and everything. Every time we hire somebody, we give them some money for coffee. We give them $100 a month to go buy coffee. I was in there and this new girl came in and she's like, “What?” They're telling her all about it. She's making me feel like a million dollars. After it was over, I asked the girl who was doing the tour, I said, “That was amazing. That made me feel so good.” She goes, “Could you tell that we kind of staged it?” I was like, “No, but keep doing it because it was amazing.” She was like, “Make Chase feel really good about this.” Do you know what I mean? It worked.
Patrick Baldwin: I feel like you know you've made it when you have tours of your facility. I think about going to the Blue Bell ice cream tour being Fat Pat. They've got a tour guide. Now, you've got a tour guide at Go Forth.
Chase Hazelwood: Yes. The person that I was telling you about who came back in to run the admin department, her name's Jamie. She was in there and I popped my head and I said, “It's a long way from downtown high point where we were.” She was like, “This place is so different. We were in this little place with three desks in the office and now we've got 15,000 square feet. It's beautifully done.” All those intangibles, they just give you so much pride.
Patrick Baldwin: The last time we spoke, I want to get an update. Signalbox did a press release. There's been some change at Signalbox as far as your involvement there. Can we chat a little bit about what's going on over there, what kind of progress they've made, and what they're currently working on?
Chase Hazelwood: They've got a deal with Voice for Pest where they're going to be doing the documentation with integrations with Voice for Pest and then some of the software where they can go through Voice for Pest and then data input AI summaries of the phone calls into your CRM directly. That's spectacular. You take a 30-minute phone call, it'll put a 3 or 4 sentence synopsis into the notes area of your customer card or whatever it is.
I don't know if you've ever dealt with this but customers call your office all the time and you need documentation and everything else. What typically happens is most of my staff seem to write down a bunch of notes on a pad or whatever and then they'll go type stuff back in later. We have to put in a delay in between calls it can take. This will eliminate that because they don’t have to document anything. Everything will be documented directly into the system automatically.
I’ve sold out. I was the owner of the company and now I’m a sales advisor. I’m not paid or anything like that, I’m just helping them. They’re right down the hall from me. I still think they’re going to kill it. They also sell a product called X-Ray. They take the data and analyze for call quality and sales-oriented things. They give you some feedback, the kind of stuff that I would want.
If you’ve heard all this crazy stuff that we measure, the way that we take those measurements and put them into something valuable is typically through like a business intelligence software or Signalbox’s AI software. They’ll maybe analyze the call and find out if we asked them about mosquitos or find out if we asked them the most important question that you have set for them to ask or any number of things.
This is the simplest form of utilizing AI so that you don’t have to have negative customer interactions because having the AI answering the phone has been a lot harder than we thought it was going to be because people are pissed off that you’re making them talk to a robot. Even if it’s just for a few minutes or seconds, they’re like, “I’m getting stuck in a phone-tree hell. I don’t want to deal with this.”
Analyzing voice calls, we’ve had people do this. They sit there and listen. They rate the customer service people on the call and on these specific metrics. Now, we can do it all through AI. If the customer was irritated with us, let us know and then your manager can go and listen to the irritated people only and those kinds of things. It gives you the ability to filter those things in and out through their X-Ray product. I’m unbelievably excited about it.
They’re shifting from marketing and advertising-oriented focus and the reality of that was not enough people were spending enough money on pay-per-click to make it worth their while to do the analysis that we were doing on our pay-per-click. Not everybody is spending $200,000 a month. That meant that we could spend almost anything on the analysis of that data and to be worth it. You could spend another $20,000 and it would pay off.
However, the phone call stuff is cheaper, it’s fantastic, and we already Voice for Pest and that’s how that whole process got started. We have it all integrated into our pest routes and all that stuff. We take a phone call and3 a few minutes later, that thing is summarized in the notes on the customer account. I don’t even know how much money this is going to save. It’s going to be incredible. It also just increases the accuracy dramatically of what’s happening. You don’t have typos and weird stuff from your employees that doesn’t make sense. You can’t understand it later but they could understand it at the time and all that kind of stuff.
Patrick Baldwin: I know that you don’t allow your technicians to call the office and ask specifics about any customer or call. Is that true?
Chase Hazelwood: Yes, no way, get off, and don’t call. We’ll block the freaking phone numbers. Technicians should not be calling the office. We give the managers hell if they call the office too much. We’ve blocked their phone numbers in the past. I don’t know if they’re still blocked or not but I know we don’t tolerate it. If anybody does an analysis, you will be floored at how often your techs are calling. How many phone calls do you think are getting ready to make you money, which are some guys saying, “Why did you schedule a 4:00 on a Friday for me?” It will absolutely blow your mind what percentage of your calls are technicians.
Patrick Baldwin: I thought I’d get you fired up on that question.
Chase Hazelwood: It still pisses me off.
Patrick Baldwin: You said you’d fire them if they called the office after blocking their number if they found a backdoor way.
Chase Hazelwood: They figured it out. They’ll figure out some way to call the office for no reason whatsoever and we definitely threaten to fire them, 100%. It’s way harder today than it used to be. Part of the thing was the AI would intercept the call and block employees from being able to talk to anybody. It would just be like, “Sorry,” and hang up on them.
Patrick Baldwin: Nick and Chase, glad to have you all. We look forward to having you all again here on The Buzz, get a picture, and get you in the rotation here. We look forward to many more episodes. Hopefully, we continue to get Chase fired up.
Chase Hazelwood: Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed this. I’ve got a great idea that my managers are going to love from Fat Pat.
Paul Giannamore: Fantastic.
Patrick Baldwin: Nick, Chase, and Paul, thanks, guys.
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Dylan Seals: Thank you so much as always for supporting us at The Boardroom Buzz. We know your time is valuable and the fact that you spend 45 minutes or an hour with us means the world. All the media that we put out from Potomac is meant to honor and celebrate you, the service industry owner. As Paul would say, “Yee who toil in the pest control vineyards.”
As part of giving back, we have this podcast, but more than that, Paul and I have been working our tails off over at POTOMAC TV. We've spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources to build out that platform to bring you market updates, to bring you visual breakdowns of the merger acquisition process, and to tell stories and present information in ways that, frankly, it's not possible for us to do on The Boardroom Buzz.
Adding the visual element takes it to the next level. I want to invite you to go to YouTube and find us, it's POTOMAC TV. Potomac.tv will get you there. Go there and subscribe. Check out some videos and leave some comments. Let us know what you like and let us know what you don't like. Let us know what you want to see more of and we'll see you over there.