Product-Market Fit in the Trades: 4x in 2.5 Years

But going back to your initial question, like, I don't. I never received pushback. I never received anyone questioning I don't know if they were amongst themselves, but it never became a problem while I was doing that.

Great, Pat, let's carry on now and hear about your ownership. So we've kind of just heard about those first seven months again. You closed in May 2024, it was December 2024, where you did break ties with your W2 and go all, you know, full time in temperature control. Anything else to say about that transition period?

And, you know, I do remember telling the team, like, hey, take a moment to look around this table and, you know, remember this moment because a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, like, you guys are going to be the OG guys that you say, like, remember when? And I really.

What a good line.

Yeah, I just. And we actually had a team meeting at the two year mark just recently and I showed the picture of the team, you know, at the time and I was like, guys, remember when we were, you know, remember when we were just the four of us in this room? So super, super cool. But yeah, I just, my, my approach was just to be kind of like, just learn about the people, learn about what was working,…

But my approach was not like to change anything. And going back to having an owner, a former owner, that was super helpful in that transition. You know, Steve came in and was like, hey, I really am confident in Pat.

He's going to be great. He's going to be a great leader for you guys. He was definitely building me up, which I think reduced some of the potential pushback that I could have gotten because it's maybe very easy for the team to just perceive me as, oh, who's this young guy that doesn't know what he's doing?

I think they saw early on I was super interested in learning about the operation, learning about them as individuals, learning about their goals, what they're trying to accomplish in the next 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, and being a part of building something. So that was what I really remember from early on. And then diving into the weeds, I just saw a huge opportunity for follow up.

You know, the business was running, you know, Steve at that time, you know, he was kind of just tired in his career and looking for the next thing. So I'm sure things weren't perfectly optimized and I just saw an opportunity to. Guys would send work back into the office and say, hey, you know, this customer needs this, this and this.

And literally just to come part, like put that together and proposals and send that out in a timely manner and effectively communicate to the, communicate to the customers. And even without growing the number of technicians, like we vastly grew the business.

So it was early on it was like a lot of like ride alongs, learn about the trade, learn about the intricacies of the equipment and then just meet the customers, communicate to them and follow up on work. And that's, that was the main focus probably for the first eight months to eight to 12 months without really changing any processes, systems, adding new people, anything like that. And it worked…