So, I'm curious, and part of this course is also teaching people how to train other people. So, what kinds of training do you do with your staff to get them acclimated to be salespeople? Well, in order to be a good salesperson you have to believe in what you're selling. So, we want them to understand Carrier, that's our flag, that's the company. Carrier invented heating and cooling. So, basically, we feel like we are the top dogs in the industry. So, we're constantly getting them educated on new technologies, products, how they work, the inner workings of things. So, we spend a lot of time and a lot of money sending our employees to different classes. We have a lot of classes here. First Friday of each month, we bring all the employees together and we basically try to sell something to them. This month, we're working on for example, core thermostats, T-Stats, and EQB T-Stats. It's all wireless. The millennials love their phones. So, we are working right now on teaching our staff the ins and outs of these particular T-Stat. So, anytime anything comes along, and a lot is coming along right now because millennials are purchasing about 50 percent of the homes in the marketplace right now. So, that's a big opportunity for us to sell. Millennials will buy anything and everything. They want everything now. Some of the old timers they don't want anything. But, to be a good salesperson, we send some of our better salespeople to say ,"Listen, your house is very dry. You can really use this system. It'll help make the air little moisture or you should wipe a lot, does she? Yes, she does. We can give you a system that's going to help purify your air, take a lot of dust out." But basically, you're always teaching your employees, you're always sending them to classes, we're always bringing people here to the shop to have them trained. If they show an interest in something, we have a lot of our employees who will come to us and say, "I sold this the other day." Well, if we look into it and we believe in that product, then we will try to sell it. It's a big thing, you have to believe in what you're selling. I believe in people. I believe in making people be better than they think they can be. We have employees that they used to say when I started here that they would just foot renters, I hate that. There's no such a thing as a foot renter here. You are a foot renter but you're also a salesperson. You're an educator, you're a trainer. So, basically, sales is so big for what we do. It's a part of our life every single day. I have to sell myself to these employees every day I walk in here. I have to come in with a positive attitude no matter what's going on in my personal life and my finances. I have to have a steady constant me. So, I have to sell me every day when I walk in the door. So, there's a lot of stuff for sales going down here at NCD Cooling daily. So. By the hour. Service techs are also good salespersons. So, you try to find that personality in somebody that's very excited about everything, and we have them actually ride in the van. Cost us a lot of money to do these things but it works out most of time at the end. But they'll ride with our service tech for a month or so. Then, some guys we actually get out a little quicker than others out on their own. Then, we may do some training here in the office. Our salesperson may do a little training in the office as well. But mostly it's just take them out, get your hands dirty, and letting them witness what our guys that are very successfully are doing. To be honest with you, some of our guys here they are sweethearts. They will actually take them to lunch and they'll sit down and say, "No, listen, when we go to the next house, I want you to take the lead on this." It's funny because they're backing off and they don't want to do it, but I noticed that when you give somebody some confidence, and you praise him, and you build them up, you would be surprised how awesome the salesperson. Some of these individuals can be made even though they were good at sales, but they're good at life, they're good at living. So, I think that automatically makes you a pretty good salesperson. That's a personal opinion of course but I like people that smile a lot. A lot of our service guys, if you notice, they smile all the time. Not after being with some of the customers but you got to have a rainy days to appreciate the sunshine. So, what would your advice be to the guys? Maybe they having a hard day and they are like,"Men, I'm not just good at this." How do you build them back up to say. "You know what, you have bad days." Or sometimes like I don't know these customers they don't want to change. They're not going to change. A lot of times, I think we live in a society where if it doesn't go your way, you want to quit. I think personally that when it doesn't go your way that should make you strive that much harder the next day. If you have that same situation, that same circumstance that you step your game up a little bit. We're not perfect. We make mistakes. We make wrong decisions. But you could be consistent, and go to work every day, and give it your best. No, you're not going to have a good day every day. I try to have a good day everyday. I strive for that and It's pretty hard to do. But when you have good days, really appreciate them. When you have bad days, you'd really learn from them, and appreciate those as well. I think honestly that the more bad days one has, the better they will be later on down the road. We're on the potter's wheel, and if it were easy everybody would do it. But I think that if you go out you find that you're struggling, and you're having a bad time, and you're constantly falling down, I'd tell you to to keep getting back up. Keep dusting yourself off. If you have a passion to do it, you also have to find something too that you enjoy doing. If you're not a good swimmer, you don't want to be a lifeguard. If you're not really comfortable driving a tractor trailer, don't drive a tractor trailer, but understand though, if you do have a passion to do those things. Everybody started out not knowing. Everybody started out having bad days. Everybody started out just making mistakes. But you play the game, those things will go away. Also, remember too, whatever you have someone on underneath you that was where you were. I think it's imperative that you make sure that you bring them up, and you encourage them, and you understand that they're trying. Some people they bully people when they are on those positions and I don't like to see that. But, then again, there also in a potter's wheel, you have to have thick skin. If you can deal with that guy, you can deal with that kind of a customer. You can deal with that kind of a boss. So, we're always being made to be better. But you got to have passion for it though. You have to want to do it. You have to want to get up and go to work every day. It's a blessing and a privilege to have your health to get up and go to work. A lot of people don't realize that. There's a lot of people onetime, several times, they actually out there working their butt in the hospital and it's been hot. We haven't had a good day, and the crane operators not doing what we need them to do, and it just gets frustrating. But if you look up at the hospital and you think of all the people that are sitting in there and can't go to work, we got up pretty good. So, I get up and go to work. Make a living. Enjoy it too, it's supposed to be fun, and when it's not fun it's okay. Doesn't mean you're a bad person or you're doing anything wrong. Just keep trying, keep plugging away and understand that one day it won't be like that. Not every days are like that. So, hang in there. That be will be my advice. So, how how do you reward your salespeople or the installation people that are doing sales? For good high sales or great customer services, is there some reward or some motivational thing you do? Yeah, I mean, they make commissions. We do a lot for our employees without them even asking. We do a lot of appreciation parties. I buy gift cards for them a lot. There is a candy jar in the office that the guys, they just love that. So, we keep that stock but money is a motivator, always has been in as far as your sales go. I know that there's some people that they don't care, they just go out and sell. But it is nice to be able to hand them a check or to set some goals and say, "Listen, if you get to this level." We've done everything from steak dinners, for instance, just recently I sent some of my top guys to a skeet shooting range and they shot skeet all day and they had a steak dinner at the end of the day. We take them out on a boat on the lake. It's you're constantly trying to be creative. But I also think though that it is their job to do that, it's what we pay you to do. So, we do reward. We do have goals and things but really and truly for us it's just go do your job. We do those things just because we're nice people. I know a lot of companies don't do what we do and a lot of them say you guys are crazy doing it. But I'll be honest with you, I enjoy doing it. I like spending time with them and seeing them smile and laugh and we actually have a lot of opportunities to meet their wives. I work with these guys and I'm with them more than I am with my own family. I think that sometimes, the wives, we talk about this guy at work and that guy at work. I think it's important to get them involved too and have moments when we have their families and my family and we're all together and it's uncomfortable when it's weird. But we've been doing this so long now that everybody's, there's cliques these girls will hang out together, these kids will play together. So, it's nice but the reward is always going to be some money, tools, gift cards. We take them on overnight trips, some of them. We're getting ready to do a large promotion. We're going to start dealing with another company. This company is going to take the entire plumbing division and we're going to go to classes in Pittsburgh, because we want them to understand the ins and outs of this company, how it's going to work with us, and then we're going to take everybody out to dinner. We're going go take everybody to play golf, and then we're going to get their way back here and tell them to get to work and let's make some money. But for us that's how we deal with our employees. So, your method of costumer service, I know you have your own way about things. Now when you started working here, did it change or did you just elevate it? How do you think this affects your customers, the people who work for you, that sort of thing, your level of customer service and what you do? Do you have a certain thing that you tend to do? Well, we certainly are always heightening our customer service right now we just got involved in a system called Titan. One of the things we found is people, if you schedule an appointment, it's like Comcast or someone's going to come to your home, they're going to be there between these hours. That's a pretty broad thing and it's tough for people that are trying to work and raise kids and just life. So, we found that we actually were able to get this system called the Titan system. So, we're going to come to your house and let's say we have between 12 and two. Your phone will ring. It will send a picture of who's coming to your house. It'll tell you the things that he or she enjoys doing, a little bio on them and you can actually watch our vans drive to your house. So, if you wanted to jump in the shower and you said, "I've got 35 minutes before it gets here," you can jump in the shower. So, we brought that in, customers love that. We ask them, we do customer surveys. Our employees actually like to sit down and go over the surveys with the customers because they feel like they've done such a good job. So, those are some of the things that we that we do now that we didn't do. We do a lot of customer surveys. Every install, every service person, the customer puts a ranking on 1-5 for the stars for the service techs. Our service techs are all 4.5 and I've got a five. Very seldom, I don't think I've ever seen anything really lower than that, and I look for those things because I want to make fun of somebody sometimes. But the guys do a good job with that, lots of communication with the customer. We communicate with the customer after the sale. We sell maintenance agreements. We call them on the birthday sometimes. We do a lot of the customer service thing. It's all about your customers. We work for them, if it weren't for them we wouldn't be here, and the employees understand that they appreciate that. But that's some of the technologies that we've started using. The owner of this company started this company 18 years ago. He put his house up for to start this business and he had a rough time. Everybody knows in business it takes about five years before you really have a handle on a business or starting it from the ground up. We are 18 years old and we have our own dock shop now with our own plasma machines and coil machines and we've got 40, 50 employees. We have a lot of vehicles, it takes a lot to get to that point. When you have an owner that has passion for what he's doing, it makes us want to be better employees, which makes us better for our customers. We do a good job for the customers and again, it's a blessing. It's appreciating where you are and understanding that it is a gift to be able to have your health to do these things. So, I know that the business is very busy. Why do you think this business so successful especially in the area of new sales and repeat sales? I think our marketing. Morgantown is an area that's constantly growing. There's a lot of opportunity here. We are the big dog on the block and have been for a little while. We understand the importance of trying to stay ahead of our competition. Customer service, hiring the best people we can find, paying them a nice rate that they want to be here. We have great insurance benefits, IRAs. But this area is such a great area and we really don't travel and our businesses just continue to grow and grow with a. We do all different kinds of advertising whether it be on the radio. We have commercials. We're getting ready to do TV. Honestly, for us it's word of mouth. We do a pretty good job and people refer us. I think that I've been in business for a lot of years, that is the best advertising, its people. I'm not saying that we've done everything right, but we've done an awful lot right and when we've done wrong we've made it right and I think that that goes a long way. So, it's word of mouth is probably the biggest for us. Then of course the law, the big contractors and people in town. They have confidence in us and our ability. So, we get all their work which opens us up to new clients. Then next thing we're doing, we do a lot of maintenance agreements for WVU. It is nice to have these accounts and our guys do a really good job servicing these accounts, and then it brings more work and then we hire more people, when it just continues to go. Then of course, the more that our employees sell, being salespersons. You said yeah, the install guys they do install. But there is opportunities for those guys to sell. Whether they noticed an aging hot water heater. Maybe they think they heard somebody say something about they never have enough hot water, how about a tankless, filtration systems, humidifiers, that's a big one too. One of our employees today he's an installer, he sold a humidifier and he sold an April air system, which is a larger. Basically filtration, air filtration system. So, when you have air by doing all these things and hit on all these cylinders, you're going to break, you're going to attract a lot of people to you, you're going to bring a lot more clients to you, which they have friends. So, I think just going out and doing a good job every day, give it your best and shoot for the stars. What advice would you give a younger you who's trying to move up that company? I would tell him to find me, because together, we will rule the world. What kind of advice? I would probably tell them to be, "I wasn't as patient as I think I could have been. I thought I knew everything, and I didn't. I think that when the times that I quit, I wish that I didn't." I would say, "Be happy. Life goes rogue very fast. Appreciate opportunity. The big thing would be is to find somebody that appreciate you. I actually worked for a lot of people that didn't appreciate me, but they taught me how not to be to people when I got into the management position." I would say I didn't like this individual. He wasn't very kind, but then when I was able to be in the position he was, I knew to be kind. "So, just pay attention to everything. Just because that you have someone around you that's not maybe very good at what they're doing, take notes, learn from their mistakes. There are a lot people have a lot of positive things too, so take the positive with the negative and just be patient and and enjoy the ride." That's exactly what I would say, "Enjoy the ride." And also, "If you could find me, find me. I'm telling you, the two of us together, we could rule the world." I know you probably tell him, "You're good looking." He's not as good looking as I am, but he's certainly would be a second. So, you have a very dynamic personality. People love you. You're a people person. People genuinely want to be around you. How did that start? Were you born that way? Because that's like a natural sales thing. Was it something that you feel like you learned over time, or in the restaurant business, or even before that? Where do you think that comes from, and how do you get other people to try to, not necessarily be more like that, but that is a good quality to have? Like you said, come in, be the best you. How do you instill that in your employees, but where did it come from for you first? Well, thanks for the compliment. I appreciate that. For me, personally, when I grew up, we didn't have a lot of money and we worked hard all the time. I actually, my very first sales that I remember, my grandmother worked for a jewelry store, and I remember I would stay with her and she would dress me up, not have on dress pants and you only had one set of nice clothes, so I wore them often. But I would go to work with her and I went into the jewelry store and there was like a Mickey Mouse watch section. There was the Kettermans that owned the jewelry store, it was Kettermans Jewelers. I went in and I just started greeting people. It was just a natural thing for me. I just naturally enjoy talking to people, and I'll be talking about the jewelry as if I'd been the jewelry business all eight years of my life, when I probably was even younger than that. I remember the Kettermans said to my grandmother that, "We've never sold as many Mickey Mouse watches as we're selling now a day in a year." So, can he keep coming back? And I think that as a young man, when I heard that, because I still remember that day, I think that was one of the things that made me realize that I had maybe a gift. I don't even think I would call it a gift, but at the time, it was something that I could do and I felt like I was contributing. Personally, for me, I just think that I don't know how we can go through life and all of us not be like this. I know God makes everyone different. I'm very religious person. I've always been. I am to this day. I have religious stuff all over my office and it's just a part of me. But I think that to live in a country that we do, as free as we are, to have clean water, to have a vehicle, I can come to work, to have all these things. I think that that is the hard part is now that I have all those things, life basically just being a father, and a husband, and son, and a friend, it's all these things that for me, I feel so blessed to be even playing the game of life, that all these things for me are just natural. I love this country. We are the best country in the world. I don't blame everybody for wanting to be here. I believe though that if everybody in this country were to get up, and go to work, and contribute, and just go to work and do the best you can, you sell every day, when you smile at someone, you sold something. And then when you sold them, there's a feeling that people get. I think that for my employees, I think that by maybe me, they make me better at what I do, and I hope that I make them better at what they do when it's all said and done, but I've always had a thing for sales. I've sold rainbows. I've sold encyclopedias when I was a kid in DC. I was from Washington DC. They would drop us off and we would all ride in these bands, and they would drop us off in these neighborhoods and we would just go sell magazines and we would sell encyclopedias. It wasn't even the money, I just wanted to sell. And I found myself spending more time than anybody in people's homes, because next thing I know, there's some people, I think I had dinner with them. You're not supposed to have dinner with these people, but for me it was always a natural thing. I just feel blessed to have this ability. And again, I truly believe that if you believe in what you're selling, it's pretty easy because I feel that way anyway. That's the lifestyle really? It kind of is, yeah. And daily, I don't go home from work every day and I'm not in a good mood. This is a stressful job. It's 5 million dollar company. We're getting ready to buy another $3 million company, so we're going to go to $8 million pretty quick. There are stresses that come with this position, but I love this position. The days go very fast. When I go home though, I have to know to shut this off. I need to walk in the door, and the dog's jumping all over me, and I have to make time for the dog. And then the daughter, my daughter I have a special needs daughter, she is very happy all the time. So, for me, I just think that it makes me stay happy and continue to try my best and enjoy the blessings that I have. It could all change in a second as often life does, but I think that, I don't know, I just feel like I'm pretty blessed to even realize that life in general is so precious and so awesome. Even this opportunity to do this today, I enjoy these things. Yeah, there's lots of things to do, but there's always lots of things to do. So, I thank you again for today, for allowing me to talk to you. You're successful at what you do. I think you already have said it a couple of times, but if you had to think about your mantra or motto obtaining atoms, why do you think it works for you and where did it come from? I think it came from my grandparents. Growing up, I had some incredible people in my life who I think about, it makes me emotional. But I was blessed. I had great friends. The motto would be, honestly for me is to just get up and smile. When you get knocked down, get back up and understand that life isn't about standing, it a lot about flowing. I think the key really is to appreciate when you get knocked down, and smile and get back up. That will be the motto. Obviously, life is not fun. There's tragedies that happen. We lose people along the way. And by the way, one day you're going to be dead too. We're all going to be dead. So, have a good time while you're here, be honest, be compassionate. I think oftentimes you'll see somebody that needs something, help them. If you live like that, it would be awesome.
