8-Figure Exit After 5 Years

The old people that have been used us and why aren't you using us? And so we made a conservative effort to really grow our service side. And over the course of the five years that I, that I owned it, we did extremely well and grew it by almost 50% on the service revenue on the service side, which is a high margin, which leads to other opportunities, leads to construction, which also then leads to…

So it was a very good success on our service side, emphasizing that side of the business.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that we full on changed the model. What we did change, though, is because there's not a lot of competition in this space. It became obvious to me early on that there wasn't a big focus on customer experience.

The kind of mantra was, where else are you going to go? Okay, maybe you go to that other competitor and you'll be back in in two months. I just don't want to.

Even if there's not a lot of competition, I don't manage that way. I don't run a business that way. And so we really, we.

One of the roles we created was a customer concierge. Their job was to represent the customer in everything we do. So if there's a billing dispute, if there's a customer calling in, saying, you know, questioning something, this person was told, you represent the customer, not us.

So what do we need to do and how do we need to make it right? And so then they'd work with the service manager to address that. Again, ways and things and approaches that didn't exist in the past.

And I feel we did get a lot of traction from that. Our customer turnover rate went down quite a bit. People were continuing to call us, so we were a lot stickier.

And as our salespeople did go out and get new accounts, we, we, we saw that we were able to successfully steal them, if you will, back because of the, the customer service approach that we, again, there's, there's a lot of not so nice people in this industry and we wanted to be the people that you wanted to work with.

And the not so nice piece is just because the competition is thin. So people can, I think that's not treat customers very well.

It's also just an industry that's kind of, can be rough and tough and kind of blue collar and yeah, just not a focus on on customer experience.