Hiring for Values, Investing in Mentorship, and Leveraging Tech Boosts Retention and Workforce Stability in the HVAC Industry

This is This is straight straight straight out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Straight Out of Crumpton. I'm Greg Crumpton, your HVAC host for the rest of your day. Guys, today is a special day. I've got a special guest and a friend, Mike Rizzone, who is the service sales VP for Arista Air Conditioning based in New York. However, about a twenty five year friend of mine. It's like a double treat today. So, Mike, welcome to the show. So glad to have you. Thanks, Greg. Always a pleasure. It's been so long since we've connected. Just just a pleasure to to to connect with you again and appreciate being on the show. It's my honor. I saw you. I don't know two or three months ago. We got to see each other for just a few minutes out in Colorado. Man, I just thought what a great thing we could do to get together and just talk about our wacky industry and talk about the great people that are in our world that are also in the HVAC world but are wacky like we are. I just love it. So I I don't know. I was thinking about the other day and it's been at least twenty years because I think that o three or o four is when my company, Airtight Mechanical, joined at the time the Unified Group. That's when we all kinda started getting to know each other and you and I were talking just for a few minutes before we hit record. This freaking industry has some of the most high quality people in it. When I met you, I'm like, that dude's one of us, one of me. You know, I felt connected. And then you, lucky devil, wound up marrying a lady who I always had such a good rapport and a great friendship with. And then here we are. Alright. Before we get going too deeply, I always almost forget to do this. Just give us give us that quick bio on you. How how did you wind up here, Mike? How did you wind up in the wacky world of air conditioning? And what in the world are you doing at Arista? Yeah. Crazy little journey I had actually. My introduction to the industry started when I was seventeen years old. I actually was a parts runner for an HVAC company in New Jersey that a distant relative had owned at the time. I was running parts after high school and continued to do that throughout college. Graduated college. It's all life insurance and disability insurance for about a year. And he called me up and he said, hey. What are you doing? You know? You wanna come back? I'm looking for a sales guy. And I came back. You know? I came as twenty three years old. I came back to the company. His company at the time was a maintenance sales guy knocking on doors and selling maintenance contracts. And I did that for probably about four or five years. And what happened was and this is what I love about the industry. At the time, the owner of the company, he was a brilliant technician, brilliant engineer, brilliant guy. But as it related to the rest of the business, sales, marketing, HR, all of that kind of stuff, he wasn't necessarily skilled, trained for, trained at, and or even enjoyed doing that. So he said to me, he says, hey. You know, I want you to be my partner. You know? Come on. Be my partner. You'd be the COO of the company. You run the day to day operations of the business. I'll take care of the technical end. And we had to run. We did that for about nineteen years. So cool. Yeah. It really, really was. What happened in the interim in terms of kind of just personally, I'm kind of a self help junkie. And, you know, through kind of just my own kind of growth and development, I was working with or joined a a kind of a peer advisory group of other business owners in the area, kind of like a mixed group. So almost, what our industry is used to. And I really got kind of turned on to that because we were working with entrepreneurial companies, those entrepreneurial businesses, small to midsize companies that were the makeup of that organization. And then I got I hit a point, Greg, where I said, you know what? I I wanna do something different. I wanna help people. I wanna help people in a different way. And I want them sell I want them sell my interest back to my partner in the HVAC business and joined this consulting firm. So for about eight or nine years, I was working with entrepreneurs and c suite people of small to midsize companies, helping them grow from a leadership perspective, helping them grow and develop the tools and skills needed to run and grow their companies, which was so rewarding. I just absolutely loved it. As fate would turn out, I got introduced to the president of Arista, the company I'm currently with right now. Our firm got introduced to work with the leadership team at Arista. And unbeknownst to the president of the company at the time, I was not aware that I had nineteen years of HVAC experience. And at the same time, there was a void in Ariston that nobody was running sales. He was between sales managers at the time. So for three years, I operated as Arista's outsourced director of sales on a part time basis as a consultant. So I was running sales three days a week for Arista, which was really kind of, kind of interesting and and and fun at the same time, juggling a lot of things. And then in two thousand twelve, I came on full time. Came on full time and have the pleasure and privilege of, you know, of growing and working with we are one of the largest HVAC contractors in the New York metro area. I run-in about a hundred trucks, hundred sixty seven employees, and it's just been a blast. So it gave me the opportunity. And one of the things that attracted me about it is the ability to work within an organization, especially on the people side. You know, as a consultant, I could and a coach, I was able to guide, give advice, do that kind of thing, but I never had really the responsibility because I was working with other organizations to actually grow and mentor people directly. And that was always something that was intriguing to me. That's what I wanted to ask you about because, you know, I feel like that's your natural style. You know, having been around you, you're that type of person. Your personality to me is I wanna help. You're a you're a doer, but you're a helper doer. Part of my biggest joy in in running my business as I did and now working at ServiceLogic and even the crazy little startup stuff that I'm involved with, my biggest joy nowadays is helping somebody take that next journey, that next step in their journey. And it may be from a first year apprentice to a second year apprentice, or it could be from a dynamic salesperson to a sales leader or whatever. It's just I love the the the the spurt, you know, like, the the tipping point of when they and a lot of times they're there. They just don't want to acknowledge or admit that they're there for whatever reason, lack of awareness or, you know, just being humble and not wanting to step up. But I freaking love that piece of the business. So you having done it from a a consultant standpoint and then now doing it from your day job, so to speak, that's gotta be really cool to get to do it. Yeah. It really is. You know what? You I don't know. You probably can't see here. I have a frame thing above my above my desk here. It's a quote from Michelangelo, and it says, I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free. Nice. And what right? And what that means to me, right, is that every everybody has everybody has their angel. Right? Everybody has their masterpiece within them. And I think the responsibility of anybody in a leadership role is to kind of chip away and find that angel, find that masterpiece. And that's the joy of growing and developing people. Right? Finding out what they're good at. Right? Leveraging their strengths, minimizing weaknesses, and having them be the best version of themselves that they can be. As I was Matthew Matthew Kelly, author of, The Dream Manager said in that book, which is a wonderful book. Organization can't be a better version of itself until its employees are becoming better versions of themselves. And I believe that. So kind of my passion around making sure culturally and from an organization perspective that people really are supported and nurtured to be the best best versions of themselves is really kinda that's the secret sauce for an organization to get to that next level. Totally agree with that. And when I was kinda coming through life as a as an apprentice and then as a a journeyman and then as a young project guy or whatever into sales and into leadership, We never talked about stuff that was really important to the humanistic side of us understanding and maybe it's maturity as an industry and as well as maturity as people. It's really cool when you can say no, I do want to know what you really wanna do in life other than just go change that compressor that I need you to change today. I love learning about the human side. I learned, I love learning about people's interests outside of work and I don't know if I'm getting soft or more inquisitive. I can't figure out which side of the family. I'm probably both. But I'm up here and I'm in Asheville North Carolina today. I'll toot our company's horn just a little bit because they did such a great job. So we have fifty five companies around the US and Toronto. We have an operating group. Asheville North Carolina got hammered in the hurricane Helene. We've got one hundred employees up here that work for Gentry service company, a service logic company, and three families lost their entire homes gone. You know, over the last nine weeks or whatever it's been since that tragic day or tragic week of loss, our company has done some really cool stuff from helping these folks restart their life. You know, I I won't go into the personal stuff on it because I don't wanna be braggadocious. But what I'm talking about is the ability to help people in their time of need, whether it be at home or whether it be at work. And I got to witness it firsthand in a major way due to this God awful tragedy. I mean, it's still a freaking mess out here outside these doors with debris piled up in some places six feet along the road for a long stretch of the road. That human side of our business and that culture side of our business, it can't be replaced. Several of us came up from the corporate team today to have kind of a year end celebration to celebrate their resilience, their gumption, And they kept the darn business running even though the building I'm sitting in, I think the fire department took over as their operations center because we're up on a hill. But we just came up to celebrate that human side of it. And I don't know that thirty years ago we would as a culture, as a company. I I don't know if it would have felt like it feels now, but, damn, it feels so good to get to do it. Yeah. I I one, I think that's often awesome, and kudos to to your organization for having a culture that feels that way about one another. But to your point, I agree. I think thirty, you know, thirty years ago, I think it was a different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was, you know, more of a command and control. There wasn't the awareness now of the impact of what that means, the u the humanity of it from a leadership perspective. Part of my personal belief around that is that lead leadership to me is very interesting from the perspective that it is a skill like anything else. And I think one of the challenges that organizations have is that we tend to promote people for what they know. Right? Right? We take the best salesman, make them a sales manager. The best guy in the field, make them a field supervisor, etcetera. And yet We're no training, by the way. That's the point. With an entirely different skill set, it is entirely different job altogether. And yet and then we wonder why. Right? Bob isn't producing, you know, can't get the team to produce the sales or Johnny can't get, you know, the service team to do because they weren't trained to do it. I think that lends itself to the fact that, you know, organizations need to put a focus on that because when you're when when you are in responsible for an element or a division of your organization with no training, Right? It's tantamount to sending, you know, sending a technician out with no training and saying, go fix the chiller. Go fix it. Right. You know, you're a good guy. You seem to have some technical knowledge. People like you. Go fix it. How about it? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to do that. You know, I think coming back, I think the training element of having people understand the impact of what that is. You know, it's funny. You mentioned it. It was interesting when you said that about your your organization helping people. There's a study that was done. I think it was in, like, the nineteen forties, and I believe it's been validated, like, every ten, fifteen years since then. And this was very interesting. They had a list of ten things that they gave to employees, and they asked them to rank these things in order of importance to them. And then they gave that same list to their managers and asked the managers to list the ten most important things that they think were important to employees. The top five things that employees came back with that's that they felt were most important to them were appreciation, stealing in and belonging, help with personal issues, job security, and money. Now when the managers were given that same list, they put those things at the bottom of the list other than money. Right? So it was such a disconnect. And the fascinating part to me, right, from a leadership and cultural perspective, is the top three things don't even cost any money to do. Right? Right. Telling people that you appreciate them. Eighty one percent of employees say they will work harder if they would just felt appreciated, if their manager just told them that they were doing a good job. Doesn't even cost any money. Right? And and statistically, they you can have a ten to twenty percent increase in productivity, you know, and profitability from that. So all of these kinds of things to me around how companies can maximize, it's not just about buying materials better or running the guys harder. Right? It's about getting discretionary effort out of people. And that's where, you know, I think is the the kind of the key. Yeah. I don't think that that one percent savings on copper fittings is gonna matter if your people don't want it to be there. Exactly. I get I go a lot to our businesses. And, like, today when I walk in here, I mean, I hug six or eight people when I walk in. That's because that's what we do in the south, I guess. And Yeah. The fact that I genuinely like hanging out with the quality of people that I get to hang out with. It's just such a cool thing to see when we know we're gonna work hard. We know that we're gonna do the right thing. We know that we're gonna do everything we can to make the customer satisfied. But if you can't hug each other or handshake or whatever you like to do together, then what's the freaking point, man? Right. I agree. You know what? I I say that to people here. Like, we spend more time with the people we work with than our own families. When you think about that, the time you spend at work forty, fifty, maybe sixty hours a week side by side with people versus the few hours a night you might spend with your significant other or kids or what have when you do it, it's like, if you're go if if that's the way it is, and it'll it just is at times, you sure as hell would hope that you get the people that you're working with and if you're in an opportunity to hire those people, train, mentor, guide, that they are the people you wanna hug. And there there's a there's a fellow that works here. His name's Cole Stewart. He's like the uncle that everybody loves. He's about forty years old, so he's kind of the big brother. Yeah. But that dude takes such good care of people that these and he's operations guy. He he runs logistics. He runs he gets all the material, the equipment, all that stuff for the guys is what he does. But he's like the freaking glue to the organization because everybody knows coal. Everybody loves coal. You gotta have those coals in life. You can't just have all transactional things happening. It's like, you know, well, this morning, I had to re up my Sirius radio subscription. I dreaded that call because every year I have to do it and every year I have to negotiate to get my old rate back. And every year I deal with somebody that's not on US soil that is difficult to transact with. It's so hard, but I gotta do it because I like to hear the news. I like to hear in while I'm driving. But I just thought while I was on hold, how convenient would it be if I actually enjoyed the transaction? I probably wouldn't negotiate as hard for a free rate reduction if I like the people. So you equate that to what we do every day in in business. And the people that you serve as your customers, they feel the same way. Like, they want to have an easy transaction, and they want to give you their money to solve their problem Yep. Especially if you make it easy for them. Absolutely. And it has to be made easy. You know, I try you know, we talk about that a lot a lot here at the company of, you know, if you were on the other side of the transaction or the conversation, right, is the answer that you just gave, the email you just wrote, the phone call, the what have you, would that be acceptable to you? And if it's not, right, what makes you think it's acceptable to customers? People wanna be in the know. And the more that they're in the know, the more grace they'll extend. And I think what's fascinating about our industry too and about what we do as service contractors in fact, they did this at an all company meeting about a year ago. I was fascinated by the amount of people that it takes in our industry to render service, right, right, as a service provider. So what what I did at the company meeting is I said I don't have to remember to humor me for a bit. I said, I'm gonna tell a story. And if you hear your name in this story, please stand up. Here it is. It's a hot summer day in New York City, and the telephone rings, and Vicky picks it up. And Vicky was on for our customer service reps. Vicky stands up. I said, Vicky takes the call, and she puts it on the dispatch board. And Steve now, Steve has to. When he sent you know, another technician. And I went through the progression of what happens in a service call from the time the phone rings until we bill it. Right? Everything that was involved, I said, now everybody take a look. Look around. We had eighteen people standing up. Wow. I said, now now just think about that. That's for one service call at any step, at any point in the way. And that's what I think is fascinating about our industry. We're so dependent on one another and, thus, the need for the calls and the hugging and the great culture that an organization has because we're so dependent on everybody up and down the food down the chain that if it breaks at any given point, the customer suffers at the end. Having having that awareness, that mindset, that passion around serving people, which I think is essential and almost nonnegotiable at any level in the organization. I think whether you're picking up the phone as a customer service rep or you're a technician or somebody's calling because they have a question on their bill, every opportunity is an opportunity to leave people better than you found them. That's so fascinating. And I like to think about people coming into our industry that don't understand our industry. So you think about those eighteen people. Take one of those out of the equation and try to automate it. It doesn't work. Or either it gets really, really clunky and the customer's unhappy or they hang up halfway through it or whatever. It's so freaking people overhead centric. Yeah. Yeah. That it doesn't make sense to people that don't understand, say, service because it doesn't happen in on the construction side of the business. It doesn't happen on the automation side of the business. The hand to hand combat of taking care of a homeowner or taking care of a commercial service customer is so freaking complicated. As hard as we work to capture data and to write SOPs and understand what Vicky does, Vicky still has a lot of Vicky in her brain that you can't put into a spreadsheet or into a program. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think we we talk about this. My my thought about hiring people. Right? I equate that to an iceberg. What the analogy kind of is is that with an iceberg, only ten percent of an iceberg sticks above the waterline. Ninety percent of an iceberg is below the waterline. And when I I think about bringing people on board, I said the ten percent that's above the waterline are their skills and knowledge. It's what's on their resume. It's where they work last, and are they competent, right, for the job that they're doing. That's that's the ten percent that we see. But But don't get the three personal references that will never say anything about it. Exactly. Exactly. Right? Exactly. But then what happens is on day one, guess what shows up? The ninety percent below rank the water. Right? Their baggage, their hedge, how they see the world, their value system, etcetera. So, you know, I to your point, I think it is so critical that, you know, we hire we try very hard to hire behaviorally. We can you can train people in our industry. Right? You can't train people to have good values, to have a strong work ethic, to be motivated. That's intrinsic. Right? That's part of your DNA. You know, who can train you how to take super heat. You can do that, but it's it's the people element. I think a lot of times what organizations do is they quickly hire for that ten percent. Looks good on a resume. Absolutely. And then you're left with a handful on day one. And that's an interesting topic, Mike. About five years ago, we as a corporation, and we shared this out with our operating companies, we hired a guy. His name's Barrett. And what Barrett does is assess our applicants to see how well that ninety percent truly matches up to our job requirement. And it's amazing. Our people have gone against his words before. I was gonna ask him that. They're like, no, I I know this lady is on it. They don't last six months. No kidding. Really? This dude has like a ninety nine percent success rate. When we listen to Barrett, we rarely falter because over well, it's been, I don't know, five or six years probably. But continuously refining the profile of a maintenance sales rep or a project sales rep or a dispatcher or whatever our role is, we've run enough now to where we know if that ninety percentile under the waterline is going to fit or not. That's fantastic. It's increased or or decreased our failure on hire, and I blame it on us. I don't blame it on people because people are what they are. We either adapt to them or they don't fit the job. It's one of the two. But the success rate when we match that ninety percent to the true requirement Because you think about a maintenance salesperson. They're knocking on the door and they're getting told no a lot. Right. It takes a special resolve to get up tomorrow and go do that again. Absolutely. It's like the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again. Well, the endorphin hit from the sale that they do get carries them through all the nose. Right. But until you really dissect the role and see how many noes or how many whatevers until you get to yes, can they endure it? And and that's really what it comes down to is just understanding that ninety percent. I love that. I think the good for you guys, and that is the right that is that's the way to do it. I read something a while ago. I don't know if the the number is still right, but they said that the cost of a the cost of a wrong hire is seven to ten times salary. Absolutely. Right? When you think about the real costs of training, blah blah blah, and then the soft cost of lost opportunities, things of that nature. I often think about that. I I say and that's what I find fascinating about the hiring process. I love what you just said and what you what what your organization is doing because it's spot on. In that right? What do we have? An interview with somebody for for twenty minutes, a half hour? Maybe they have a second interview? It's like seven to ten times salary. Right? Think about that. If you're paying somebody fifty grand. Right? If that's three hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand dollar investment, where else are you investing that kind of money that you would not do due diligence greater than fifteen or twenty minutes? You buy a house, you're doing a damn home inspection. Right? You got somebody crawling around the attic. You're looking for everything to make sure, and yet we don't do that with people. We look at the ten percent. We look at the resume. We're we we need somebody. So, yeah, let's go. And then you're saddled with something for six months, and it's a nightmare to get rid of them. Blah blah blah. So kudos to you guys. I'd love hearing that. That's that's great stuff. Well, I'll I'll send you his card where you can talk to him. Yeah. Beautiful. Appreciate it. But the other piece of that, you think about the seven to ten times, the the eight, nine, and ten times is probably the other people that are saddled with that person that have to pick up slack or are so pissed off at that person that they they wanna talk about that person. It's just like a freaking nightmare because you it's like you put a bomb in your own office. Yeah. It's true. And you know what's interesting about that too? I think culturally from an organizational perspective, it speaks to the fact of you're kind of lowering the standards within the organization. If everybody knows that Bob isn't a great hire, Bob's values aren't consistent with what the organization has, Why should Mary work any harder? Right? If this is the bar that the organization is willing to accept for behavior or what have you, then why should I give any discretionary effort? So to your point, great point, it is a lot more than just seven to ten times or whatever Bob's immediate cost is. It's the impact that that has throughout the organization. It erodes that culture that you worked hard because now people go, what the hell? What are we doing? You know, you start questioning stuff and it's just a freaking cancer. And and we wanna prolong it by trying to help them. They don't want help. Right. They're good. They're they're gonna make six or nine months mediocre work at a high rate of pay until you absolutely blown your top and you throw them out. They don't care. The world's trying to hire people at a record pace. They're just gonna go do that again. So how are you other other than the incredible hiring process that you have? What are you doing throughout the enterprise to keep culture alive, thriving, people in alignment, motivated, etcetera? So as you know, times have changed. In case you hadn't noticed that, go up and shut up does not work anymore. Pre COVID, like, we knew that we had to get going on our in house training program. We had to figure out the peer group piece because many of our companies that we bought were, like me, part of a peer group, like Synergy, like Unified, and we missed it. We missed what we had in that group. I mean, we paid a lot of money to be in that group, so you better make it worthwhile, And it was so worthwhile and and still is for the members that are in those groups. So pre COVID, we started okay. What do we need to do as an organization? And we were probably, I don't know, almost a billion dollars in revenue then. So we had, you know, thirty five hundred people out in the world operating in these little unique little hubs of businesses, and we wanted a flavor of service logic, but we didn't want to take away that local operating gentry service culture. We wanted to enhance it of anything. And then COVID hit. And, of course, like, everybody's in quasi survival mode, pissed off, not working, can work, whatever we were all trying to do in those twenty five years of COVID that we endured or, I mean, those two years, let's say, by twenty five. Coming out of COVID, we really got serious with our platform again. So we built what's called the edge platform, and and that's just a name that we came up with. You know, what is your edge for being part of service logic? Or The acronym spells something that nobody cares about. It's just the edge. We after interviewing a lot of our generation xers and yers, we came to the conclusion that education and training was at the top of the want list. So we really went to work and over the last two years have built a a pretty robust education platform. We're half union and half non unions. We wanted to be, you know, specific to what each operating company needed. And then we have a deal a Department of Labor certified four year apprenticeship that we can offer for our nonunion companies. And then, you know, our union companies are getting their DOL four year program through the union, but we wanted to take it a step further and just make it more than technical education. So last year, and I'm so proud of this, my partner in crime, Eric Bollin, has built the the edge. There there's a lot of us that hang off the edge of it and help a little bit, but Eric's the driving force of it. We started a leadership academy because so often the companies that we buy, we are buying from a fifties or sixty year old owner that may have ten or five or four years of runway left of what they wanna do work wise. Are we backfilling and building the bench rapidly enough because we're still buying? We we buy about one company per month on average. You know, now we're seven thousand employees and we have these big numbers. So in order to keep the snowball growing at the same velocity, we had to make sure that our people were getting what they wanted a and what the company needed long term. So we worked really hard to identify, and we built this. We call it the LEAP, l e a p program for our next generation of leaders. We've done the same thing with our sales organization. We've done the same thing with our project management. So we've really built a robust thing, but it's all about the road map for the young folks coming into the business so they can see if they want to apply themselves this discipline or this discipline. They can wind up running a business if they choose to. So that's been our goal. That's incredible. Do you have anybody leaping off the edge? But I'm pumped. I like that. I'll have to bring that up to Eric. He's got a he's got a dumb sense of humor like we do too. No. That's that's incredible, though. That's wow. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. I mean, you think about it. You know the the age of our our typical Yeah. Second year, third year apprentice. They're working for wages, and they're working to buy the first house or the four wheeler or whatever that age group is. But what's next? We gotta think about, okay, you're soon gonna have two kids and a mortgage. How do you ensure that you're continuing your lifestyle advancement to keep up with your growing family? Or if it's purely intellectual, what do you wanna keep doing? And, it it's been fun to build it, but it's really fun to watch these youngsters come through it. Are they dedicated? It's almost like a mentorship. Are there people in the organization that they're meeting with regularly to ask those questions, find out their, you know, their goals and dreams and hopes and desires that how does that work internally? Yeah. So every company, again, because we are not a dictatorship, our our our presidents run their own gig, but it's usually a service manager or sales manager or whomever managing that team that looks for and ask for people who wanna grow. And you know who they are. You know, it's the guy that shows up on Saturday to see the chiller replacement, but he's not part of the team. He just wants to come and learn. You know? The sales lady who's new to the industry who wants to understand how an air conditioner works versus just selling something that she doesn't have any idea about. So is there direct manager usually? But now that the peer groups are forming, we've got service managers peer group, safety peer group. We're starting to get some of that cross pollination where people see their peers and other companies, sister companies, doing well and and trying to pump them up, peer to peer. So it's really fun to watch it blossom, and we're learning every day of what makes it click. But it's all about road maps and giving people the ability to to participate in their road map and to set their road map of if you do x, y, and z over the next four years, this is where you can get to if you choose to. I think that's probably one of the challenges, right, in the in the industry. I think it's a little bit easier just from an apprentice perspective because they know from an apprentice kind of it's to become a journeyman. They can see those couple. But after that, then what? What's next? Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's a long road, you know, from the time you you know, if you're a relatively young young person, you know, becoming an apprentice, one time you're a journeyman, and then now you got another, you know, thirty, forty years in front of you. What are you doing with that time? And what what I'm excited about, I think, as an industry, we've been knuckle dragging a long time, but I think that we're beginning to see the advantages applying different types of technology to our situations, whether it be equipment that's reporting back to the home base. Just because the calendar says your quarterly maintenance is due, don't throw away the filters. The filters are clean. Use a a differential pressure switch. Yeah. Yeah. And let's only put those in the landfill when they need it, not because the calendar says it. The unit maybe is in a church, and it runs once a week on Sunday. You don't need a quarterly filter change. I think by getting equipment smarter, it helps us in a couple of ways. I think it makes the equipment run more efficiently. I think it makes our ability as an industry, now I'm not talking about company, increases the efficacy of every technician because we're able to be more selective about what technician needs to go on that job as opposed to hot potato dispatch, meaning a service call and a technician. They don't always work, especially commercial because there's so many different brands. There's so many different types of equipment. And the specialized training that you have to have nowadays, you can't have twenty five people that all know everything. Let your equipment help you with that. Tell me that refrigerant charge that needs to be diagnosed, then I can send the appropriate skill level out. If the fan belt is broken, I can send the appropriate tech out. I don't need to have a hundred dollar tech, only twenty dollar problem. Exactly. Great points. Absolutely. You know what's interesting too? Even about the predictive maintenance, right, that you were referring to the church, for example. You know what that also does. Right? Increases your capacity. Increases your capacity because, right, if you're if you're calendared four times a year and all of a sudden you don't need to do that to your point, you just freed yourself up. Right? That quarterly inspection doesn't need to be done. Guess what? You just have more capacity to, you know, serve another customer. Well, I think a lot of it comes down to, well, the customer's gone they wanna see us every quarter. No. They don't. Yep. They wanna make sure that their equipment's performing properly. If I sell you a a predictive maintenance contract that includes belts and filters and coil cleaning and all of that, it's my responsibility as contractor to do that. If I service you in person three times a year and I take the cost of that fourth visit and apply it to the the SaaS model of that device communicating with our home office, does skipping one month in between in person visits really matter? I don't think so. Right. I think it's a better quality of service to go every hundred and twenty days as opposed to every ninety days if you're better off at the end of the year from operating and from an efficiency, meaning the end users' energy bill goes down because we were doing the right thing. Right. We didn't need to put gauges on every unit Right. In order to lose a little bit of refrigerant when the pressures and temperatures tell us it's charged properly. Right. I don't wanna put a gauge on something. Exactly. Exactly. I agree. Through proper instrumentation and sensors, we can smarten ourselves up. And by doing that, it also eliminates part of the skills gap and the head count lack of head count because we're able to use our technician man hours like I asked earlier in a more efficient manner. And Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we're getting there, Mike. It's a slow roll for us knuckle draggers. Yeah. You know what? It it is. But but there lies the opportunity. Right? There lies the opportunity on both ends, you know, educating, you know, the contractor to come up to speed with what's available and that mindset. And then also educating the client, right, the customer, the end user to your, you know, to your very well articulated point about not having to show up for quarterly inspections because that's what you think, that's what you've always had, that's what the industry has always done. There are more efficient ways to do things. I think it's gonna create a lot of opportunity for contractors who can shift the mindset around approaching business that way, have the have an intelligent business conversation with the client. Right? Yeah. Versus just a mechanical, yeah. I know it needs to be done. I mean, one of the things I've I've always found interesting about our industry is that everybody needs what we do. Right? Everybody. Right? We're not selling Ferraris and Rolex watches in the universe. No matter what you walk into, it's probably heated and cooled to some level that needs us. And people are also aware that they have to maintain it. Right? It it becomes I'm it's a necessary evil. I know I have to do it, but I think if we can educate people to be smarter about that and change what that conversation looks like, this opportunity real opportunity for contractors. And I think that same opportunity is ripe for bringing in more females into the trade because as much as we as males like to think that we really know what we're doing, The the female mind can really add really good sauce to these equations that we're working on as well as in in the field working on digital controls. You can take a ninety pound lady that can do that really well versus a bug in a four hundred pound compressor around. There are physical differences, some of the requirements for service work. Some require more body mass, and some require more brain. Yeah. If we if we open our industry up with open arms, we just increased our opportunity pool of hiring smart people by a hundred percent. Absolutely. What's taking us a dang on? Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, you peel in that back a little bit. That's one of the challenges I think that starts at a very young level. Years ago, right, you and I were probably in high school. Right? You had you had trade school in high school. Right? You had wood shop. You had auto mechanic. You got exposed to the trades. When that stuff all went by the wayside and college quote unquote was the only opportunity and schools were pushing. Right? Schools were pushing to have ninety, ninety eight, ninety whatever percentage of their graduating class attend college. The impetus for counselors taking young, impressionable kids, and not everybody's cut out for college. Right? And I I feel bad because so many of these kids, they aren't exposed to the trade. It starts even then in our industry, and I think that's a responsibility. How do we get the schools? How do we get kids at at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, seventeen years old to understand that this trade even exists? Right? Yep. I've been working for a year or so now supporting a group called Bring Back the Trade. Steve Turner's running it out of New Hampshire. The the Canadian people are embracing this really well. We're doing a lot more real life job career days in middle schools, showing people I'm I'm not anti college. I'm pro college for the right people. Like me, I did not need to go to college. And luckily, I did not waste my money or my parents' money, however, it would have worked out because I'm I'm doing what I should have done. Kids stuck in freaking jobs with a degree in Ugandan history aren't ever going to recap their investment on that education. So let's create more awareness of what's out there. And technical school enrollment is up twenty percent in the last two years. College is down forty nine percent enrollment. So Is it really? Yeah. So I think the shift is coming, but it starts early. Jenny, she'll kill me if I can't remember her last name fully, but she wrote a book, and she was on the on the podcast with us, a children's book about the trades. And so we're starting to try to get that word out because you played with Tonka trucks when you were a little boy. Yeah. And they're probably metal back then. Yeah. They were they were. Yeah. But we grew up knowing that there was a bulldozer operator and there was a truck driver. Yep. And we we don't do that much anymore. And a lot of it's because of the digital age or what have you. I'm not bashing it. I love my automation and my digitization as much as anyone, but we have to balance that equation out with some hands on, go cut a Christmas tree down, build a birdhouse with the four h club with your granddad, whatever. We've got to keep and and I really believe the tide is ebbing. I don't know that it's reversing yet, but I think we're at a neutral point to where people are really realizing, like, okay. This and and, Mike, in my opinion, this is a national security issue, not just an industrial and money issue. If we can't build and make stuff here to take care of our company, you just said it. Every building you go in has to be maintained. Air conditioning, heating, plumbing, electrical, all the beautiful Wi Fi that we enjoy. All that has to be installed and maintained. Yeah. And if we don't have enough people to do those things as well as the organic growth that we as a populist just naturally do, we're gonna be in trouble. I agree. We have to keep we have to keep this march moving forward. We do. It's funny when you said we talked about college. I got I got a buddy who's a steelworker, and he tells this story, which I absolutely love. It's a cold winter day in New York City. He's, you know, thirty floors, you know, up up in the sky. Snow is blowing. It's freezing out there. Right? And the adjacent building, he sees a bunch of kids in a window, not very near New York City, you know, pretty close where he could see them. And the kids are banging and trying to get his attention. They finally turns and looks at him, and they hold up a sign, bunch of snot nosed kids. Right? You know? They said it's seventy two degrees in here. Okay? So with that, he looks around. He finds a piece of cardboard and a piece of chalk. Right? Scribbles. Right? Turns around and said, it's eighty four dollars an hour out here. Right? Which would which I just love. It's like, you're eighty just it's a good trade. Right? It's a good trade. You make a good living. Right? Alright. I'm good. I've gotta steal that one. I'm I've gotta steal that one. I loved it. I loved it. Oh, man. I know that we could go for another hour if we really worked at it or even if we didn't work at it. I wanna be respectful of your time. You've been so kind to take a little bit of time this afternoon and talk about this, but I love the fact that you're passionate about what you do. I'm so proud to see where you are in life and you made your deal man. You're happy, you look great. You got a a wife that I've always just thought the world of, and y'all are are happy and living it. I just really appreciate you taking time and really hope you guys have a good holiday season because here we are. I I always do this. You're not supposed to, but today's December tenth, and we're not far you know, we're, what, fourteen, twenty, fifteen days from Christmas. So I hope y'all have a great holiday. And, Thanks, Greg. Same same to you, Adnan. It's been a pleasure. It's so great catching up with you. You're one of my favorite people. My wife adores you. She, she actually knew I was, you and I will be speaking today. So she's, sent me, sent me with a a message to say how much she, she thinks of you guys, and she sends her best as well. So, just a pleasure. A pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for thinking of me and, wish you and Connie just a happy and blessed holiday season as well. Always a pleasure. Well, I truly appreciate it. And, for all of you who have stuck with us, our ramblings, our reminiscing, and our future casting, thank you for your time. I I don't take your time for granted. I'll I'll I hope you enjoy some of the topics that we get to cover here. I just love bringing good quality people, and I try to do that. And, I think we hit it out of the park today with this gentleman. So Thank you. Mike Rizzone, I'm Greg Crompton. Look forward to talking to you all again. And, Michael, I look forward to seeing you again soon. Absolutely, my friend. My pleasure. Thank you. For all of your Greg Crumpton, Straight Out of Crumpton goodies, go to greg crumpton dot com. You can go to Apple or Spotify and check out Straight Out of Crumpton podcast. And, I do want to let you know you can go buy my new book that's out. Deep Knowledge is the book, and you can find it at w w w dot deep knowledge dot me, deep knowledge dot me, or greg crumpton dot com. You can find a buy me button right there. It too is, chock full of a lot of cool stuff that, happened over the course of my career so far. And, look forward to sharing that with you. And, Mike, if you get the chance, read that book, see what you think about it. Absolutely. Makes a great stocking stuffer for Kristen. There we go. Beautiful. It's on the list. Thanks, everyone. Have a great holiday, and we will see you in the New Year. Take care. This is this is straight straight straight out of Crumpton with your host, Greg Crumpton.