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On the podcast today, John welcomes Hayden Slack to the show. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, he has worked in the Department of Defense and, in 2014, started working for his father-in-law’s foundation repair company, GL Hunt, which he still runs to this day. Then, about four and a half years ago, he started a plumbing business that started slow, but has steadily grown over the past few years. Hayden will talk about how even the roughest starts to owning a business can turn into a profitable venture, as was the case with his plumbing company, Service Squad Plumbing. He mentions how important a social media presence is for home service businesses. Hayden says it can make you look like a marketing genius by just implementing it. Like most business owners, Hayden has future visions and challenges, and he will share those with John today.
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Brandon Niro: On the podcast today john welcomes to the show hayden slack a native of fort worth texas He has worked in the department of defense And in 2014, started working for his father in law's foundation repair company, GL Hunt, that he still runs to this day. And about four and a half years ago, he started a plumbing business that started slow, but has steadily grown over the past few years.
Brandon Niro: Hayden will talk about how even the roughest starts to owning a business can turn into a profitable venture, as was the case with his plumbing company, Service Squad Plumbing. He mentions how important a social media presence is. Or home service businesses. Hayden says it can make you look like a marketing genius just by implementing it.
Brandon Niro: Like most business owners, Hayden has future visions and challenges and he will share those with John today. Enjoy.
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John Wilson: The U. S. based team has taken care of small business bookkeeping and taxes since 2005, find them online at AppletreeBusiness. com or email patrick at AppletreeBusiness. com. Welcome back to owned and operated today. I have Hayden slack on with me. Welcome Hayden. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man, this will be good plumbing brothers How about you give the audience a little bit of an intro into your background and what you're up to now
Hayden Slack: Yeah, Hayden slack from Fort Worth, Texas Married my high school sweetheart and ended up running her father's foundation repair company In my early career, I worked for the Department of Defense in a sub agency that audited defense contractor proposals.
Hayden Slack: Yeah, I currently run GL Hunt and about four and a half years ago started a plumbing business. We've just started small and steadily grown over the last seven years.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's pretty good. Before you started running the Foundation Repair business, was that your first run at Foundation Repair?
Hayden Slack: Oh yeah, I had no idea.
Hayden Slack: I got an MBA from a small state college in West Texas, and when I first came on board, it was because my father in law had a kidney transplant, and he needed someone from the family business to get some treatment. And my brother in law were pastors, my wife had already worked for her father for a little bit, and it didn't quite work out.
Hayden Slack: And so That was the only 1 there, so we just made a deal for me to go part of time at the end of 6 months. He was like, I'd really like you to stay and the Department of defense was like, hey, we'd really like you to come back and him and I just worked it out and went with it.
John Wilson: Yeah, how big was it at the time
Hayden Slack: when I got here in 2014?
Hayden Slack: We were at about four and a half million dollars between San Antonio and DFW.
John Wilson: Yeah, and you blew it up. We blew it.
Hayden Slack: We've done well. It's been fun.
John Wilson: Does Texas have basements? Very rarely. Okay, so like foundation repair, you're doing slab repairs. Yeah,
Hayden Slack: slab and pier and beam homes. And so for the slabs, we're installing piers.
Hayden Slack: And for appearing beam work, and potentially carpentry, we're going in and changing out beams, joists, sill plates, support posts.
John Wilson: What's a pier?
Hayden Slack: It varies. You've got concrete cylinders. They're 6 inches in diameter by 12 inches tall. And they just get pushed into the ground one after another. How deep?
Hayden Slack: As deep as the structure will allow. And the weight of the structure controls how far you can go down.
John Wilson: Interesting.
Hayden Slack: From the outside observer, it sounds like some kind of feat of engineering, but in reality, we're pushing crap in the ground until the house can't push anymore.
John Wilson: Gotcha. Gotcha. Elegant. Yeah.
John Wilson: Alright, so foundation repair. Yeah, so we're in Ohio, so we have a ton of basements. So when I'm thinking of foundation repair, it is mainly you're digging up an eight foot hole on the side of someone's house to repair their foundation. And it's like 30, 40 grand. You have to use all this crazy stuff to support it because it's a basement.
John Wilson: What's it look like for you guys?
Hayden Slack: Yeah, for us, since it's not as complex of a job, the methods we use in Texas aren't as sophisticated. We essentially just dig an access pit that is 2. 5 by 2. 5 feet up against the edge of the structure, expose the outer beam, and then whether or not we're pushing concrete piers or steel piers.
Hayden Slack: Use a hydraulic ram to just drive those into the ground until the house starts to lift. And once the house begins to lift, then you're no longer driving and you move to essentially bottle jacks that you could pick up from O'Reilly's to do the final kind of minute. Leveling of the home.
John Wilson: Yeah. Why would someone need a foundation repair in Texas?
Hayden Slack: The symptoms that drive them to call us are cracks in their brick veneer on the outside of their home, floors that are sloping, interior doors that will not shut properly, or probably the most common is they've been staring at these cracks for a decade and the wife finally wants to remodel. And they want to level their home before making that investment.
John Wilson: So this is common. Those sound like common things.
Hayden Slack: Yeah, it's very common and I'm pretty much all over Texas. It has to do with expansive clay soil. And I think that soil exists elsewhere in the nation, but Texas is more unique in that we've got drastic change from spring to midsummer. And so the clay soil just contracts, the houses fall, and then the cracks appear.
John Wilson: That's fascinating. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is reshaping. I'm glad I dove into this because again, foundation repair to me is like something totally different up here. Like not even the same. What is average ticket for you guys?
Hayden Slack: It's gone up, thankfully, but probably 8, 500 in DFW and closer to 10 or 11, 000 in San Antonio.
John Wilson: Gotcha. Okay. All right. So I'm now understanding why plumbing is such a good add on. For, this is insane. This totally makes sense. Like it made sense beforehand, but now I'm like, Oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah, this is great. All right. So you took over in 2014.
Hayden Slack: In 2014, when I got here, I was just handling accounting because that's what my.
Hayden Slack: Education and I started to get handed off various pieces of business. And at the time, my father in law hired a consultant. And if you take any brick and mortar trades business with virtually 0 Internet presence. And expose them to it. They're going to think you're a genius immediately because new business is going to come in the door.
Hayden Slack: And so in that 1st fall, oh, man, we had, I don't know, probably had 30, 40 percent growth just from doing Google AdWords and home advisor, maybe, but the 2nd part of their engagement began in January of 2015 and we quickly realized, and these people look at customers like prey. Yeah. And they're willing to ask us to say anything to get a deal.
Hayden Slack: So that relationship fell apart. But 1 benefit, for everybody, except for them was when I came on full time, they convinced my father in law. Hey, if you're going to pay this guy, you might as well. Let it run it.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Hayden Slack: One week I was handling accounting and looking at systems. The next week I'm given a title and just essentially keys the business trial by fire and everyone got lucky it worked out.
John Wilson: Yeah. Okay. Have you been able to buy into the foundation repair business? Do you hope to? Is that a goal?
Hayden Slack: Yeah, at some point. I think we're still working on it's a complicated deal with being in a family business and trying to come to a solution where everybody feels like it's fair. But we're making progress.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, family deals, I've said this still, but the hardest deal I've ever done was my first one, which was the one with my dad. It was also the smallest deal I've ever done, but it was the hardest.
Hayden Slack: It is. Family business Presents a whole different set of problems that make it extra difficult.
John Wilson: Yeah.
John Wilson: All right. So you're running the foundation repair business a couple of years in you're like, Hey, it'd be sweet. It's plumbing.
Hayden Slack: Yeah. I wish I could take as much credit for it as that. There definitely was the aspect of this would be a great idea. There's already. The track record of people in my industry doing it, but honestly, what happened was we outgrew a couple of the small time plumbers that were working with this.
Hayden Slack: I hired a new 1 and then all of a sudden I started getting complaints from the customers and hey, you said so and so plum is coming out, but. A whole different company came out. I don't know what's happening. So I call the guy that's working with this and he's yeah, I got behind. So I sold those opportunities to a different plumber.
Hayden Slack: That's not the agreement we have. So I'm going to have to find someone else to do it. He fires his apprentice that's doing these plumbing tests because when we're done lifting a home, a plumber goes out and just does a quick pass fail on sewer and freshwater. Gives the apprentice my cell phone number who calls me and choose me out for making him lose his job.
Hayden Slack: And by the end of the call, I had convinced him that, it really was not my fault. And he's how can I help you? And in a momentary bit of frustration. I was like, I may just do this on my own. That night I get a call from a master plumber early 40s. He wants to meet me for coffee.
Hayden Slack: So we go to Starbucks. I'm with them for 3045 minutes and we talk. In general, what it looks like, and at the time, my mindset was more of I need to build a plan, understand the plan, and then work the plan. And so I don't call it that. 2 weeks later, he calls me and he goes, hey, I quit my job. When am I starting?
Hayden Slack: And he's early 40s with 3 sons under the age of 5 and sole custody. And so immediately, I'm like, oh, Lord, I guess tomorrow show up and we'll win. That's really how I got started. He was almost half on accident. And his personal life was a disaster, and I didn't pick up on that in 45 minutes at Starbucks.
Hayden Slack: And within 6 months, he's gone, and I had to find a new master. But. But we just kept at it. Even though it was painful and eventually got it to where it was making money on its own and surviving.
John Wilson: Aside from like giving each other leads, do you guys share staff or team or resources?
Hayden Slack: Very early on I would have a CSR share duty because for the first three years The vast majority of my attention is on the foundation company, and all the plumbing business did was run plumbing tests.
Hayden Slack: If we sold leak detection, a licensed plumber would go do the leak detection and give estimates for sewer repairs, and then a team of installers would go do the sewer repairs. That kind of machine was easy to run by sharing staff. But over time, as it grew, I ended up hiring kind of an operations manager and a CSR.
Hayden Slack: And at the moment, we've got six licensed plumbers and two office staff running the business.
John Wilson: You said at the time, most of your attention was on the foundation repair business. Is it different now?
Hayden Slack: It's a little different. It was probably 90, 10 early. With the referral business, it just made the risk so low because every day it was getting new.
Hayden Slack: You could get away with kind of ignoring it and it survived on its own. But once I started to see the potential, I got more serious. So it's closer to probably 60, 40 percent at the moment.
John Wilson: Yeah. How many people are on the team right now? Like both companies,
Hayden Slack: probably low fifties between both. But that's not counting the subcontractors for GLM.
Hayden Slack: And there's another 75 to 90 guys. Across all of the subcontractors
John Wilson: now outside of plumbing have you guys thought about launching anything else on the side or acquiring or how else do you keep growing?
Hayden Slack: Yeah. At one point I tried to start a supply house to the foundation repair industry because the amount of materials we purchased from this specialty industry supply house would allow us to get it going relatively easily.
Hayden Slack: That lasted about 18 months. And we got to about a million dollars a year in revenue, and then we got sued by the largest supplier in our area because the partner we chose was the brother in law of the gentleman that owns that supply house. And so when dealing with the legal aspect of that, we were like, this really, the market's not as big as we anticipated before we got into it.
Hayden Slack: And even if we do fight it, this isn't profitable enough to really spend our attention on. So we showed them. Supply house is one attempt. We spend a ton of money with engineering. So if I could find a structural engineering firm, there would be some synergies there where we can have another business that would grow.
John Wilson: Oh, nice.
Hayden Slack: Yeah. But outside of that, it's just really the most synergy would come from growing the plumbing business, plumbing, HVAC, septic, electrical.
John Wilson: So is that the plan?
Hayden Slack: Yeah, that is my plan. I've been yeah. I've worked with CapTarget for six or eight months. And, using those services, it's easy to go I didn't close on a deal, so it's not worth it.
Hayden Slack: But it planted a ton of seeds. I had five, six, seven seller meetings and came across two great opportunities, but the sellers didn't fit your standard aging baby boomer with no exit plan. They both were. One was an early 30 guy that had been running dad's business for 12 years, and he was just burned out.
Hayden Slack: And the other one was a mid 40s gentleman who was already on his 3rd business and had recently had some success in the real estate market. And was tempted by the idea of cashing out to become a real estate tycoon. Nice. Both of those are still, I still have communication with him every now and then.
Hayden Slack: But neither of them are interested enough to really start the process.
John Wilson: Okay, so this becomes a home service aggregation. Alright, have you talked to Peter Lohmann from Columbus yet?
Hayden Slack: I don't think so. I'm familiar with him from Twitter, but I've never talked to him.
John Wilson: He just bought, his partner runs it, so all his stuff is 50 50 with his partner, and he just bought a structural engineering franchise.
Hayden Slack: I did see that he bought one, because I posted on that, because it was interesting. I really liked that.
John Wilson: Yeah, you should reach out to him. It's worked so far, and that'd be a sweet setup. That'd be a sweet setup for you. Are these two things branded separately? Your two existing companies? Yeah,
Hayden Slack: the foundation company is GL Hunt Foundation Repair, and the plumbing business is Service Squad Plumbing.
John Wilson: Gotcha. How would you brand new stuff as you brought it on? I don't know.
Hayden Slack: I've had a hard time with I had a seller meeting yesterday in Austin. It's not anything I want to keep pursuing, but the idea of buying another trades business in the same industry and what the timeline looks like for integrating it into your kind of platform company, I'm still not sure what's optimal.
Hayden Slack: What are you
John Wilson: leaning towards? What are you thinking about?
Hayden Slack: I'm leaning towards like a multi year plan where the new brand is, house leveling company, a GL Hunt business or a GL Hunt company. And then over time, you change the messaging to where it's just GL Hunt foundation repair.
Hayden Slack: Have you encountered that before? What are your thoughts on it?
John Wilson: Yeah, so we've rebranded. Companies and usually we do it over the course of a year or two. So we're in the middle of one right now and we're still working through, we did three deals last year, so we're still working through the exact timing of when to transition.
John Wilson: Cause sometimes you just don't know. That's what I found. You don't know the value of the name until you own the company. Some stuff you can figure out during due diligence. So I don't want that to sound negligent, but I don't know until you really get a feel for how much revenue is being driven off the name alone, how many calls, like the reputation from vendors.
John Wilson: And again, some of that stuff you can figure out in due diligence, but some of it, you just don't know until you own it. Yeah. We've ended up transitioning brands way faster than we would have ever thought because we get in there and we're like, Oh, the company's great. The company is amazing, but the name, no one knows it.
John Wilson: Like it's maybe they were a subcontractor or they never advertised. They never spent a single dollar behind that name. So then that's an easy brand to transition, versus someone who has 500 five star reviews and they ran radio ads for years. Like you can probably never change that name.
Hayden Slack: Yeah, I agree.
Hayden Slack: No, the one I was looking at, they primarily service realtors and investors. And had almost no internet marketing and for the market we target, we rarely work with realtors investors. It's almost entirely residential homeowners who see an issue, encounter online marketing and give us a call.
John Wilson: Yeah, you probably don't have repeat business.
John Wilson: There's no service side of the foundation business.
Hayden Slack: Not quick repeat business, the foundation repair industry in Texas gives out lifetime transferable warranties, which is a terrible business idea, but it's become standard. So everyone's locked into it. When we fix the home, they are married to us, and if they encounter issues in the future, part of the industry standard warranty language is that another contractor cannot.
Hayden Slack: Make alterations to the foundations without written consent, because if you have 2 different companies that both gave a lifetime warranties on a structure, it leads you to this finger pointing, whose responsibility it is to fix it.
John Wilson: Yeah, I saw a waterproofing business, so we have a bunch again, basement, so waterproofing businesses are pretty common here and they have lifetime warranty.
John Wilson: And I'm like, no, that sounds insane. That sounds absolutely I get it. I get why you have to do it to sell it a proper margin, but that sucks.
Hayden Slack: Oh yeah. Most of our customers at this point, historically, aren't even the people that bought from us. And we didn't get to set expectations with them on what is covered by a lifetime warranty.
Hayden Slack: They just bought a home, the realtor told them, Hey, you've got a lifetime warranty with a GL Hunt. And they call us and they think the entire house is covered. And then we've got to be the bad guy that's No, we fixed, one portion of your home. And yeah, we'll come back out forever to make adjustments on that.
Hayden Slack: But the rest of it, that needs a new work.
John Wilson: How many times does a house need work?
Hayden Slack: We offer a range of services and the lowest level one is these concrete piers, and it's almost a coin toss on whether or not we're going to be back out in three years, five years, seven years to make adjustments.
Hayden Slack: There's some homes we fix and we almost never go back. And then there's some due to the soil conditions and the drainage of the property where we're out there once a year. Everyone that has managed to find success in it just builds expected warranty costs into their budget because they know what's going to come.
Hayden Slack: Yeah, the only really predictable part is just that first transaction.
John Wilson: So how do you keep building off of that and how do you keep growing? Are you the largest in your market?
Hayden Slack: No, we are probably third and fourth. When it comes to retail homeowners, we may be second. There's a well known brand in the South called Olshan Foundation Repair.
Hayden Slack: Nolan Ryan is the face of their brand, and I think they do more, but it's essentially a treadmill. Every customer has to be replaced every single year.
John Wilson: Yeah. Do you follow Andrew Wilkinson? I think so. Yeah. What is his business? He runs Tiny, and yeah, they buy tech companies, and I always think about how he moved from what he described as a bad business, The agency model, which they used to build websites and whatever.
John Wilson: I'm not even sure what else they did to a good business, which is like a really sticky, repeatable customer base. I think about that every single day because like I go in and I'm like I pull up service Titan or whatever. And I, Hey, what's on the schedule for tomorrow. And it's if there's gaps, it's like exactly what you just said.
John Wilson: You have to replace the customer like every day you have to like, something has to happen. And I'm like, man, Why am I buying more home service companies?
Hayden Slack: Yeah.
John Wilson: Or like anything, the grease trap and sort of septic business. That's the first variation. That's Oh, this is repeat. Yeah, I'm into this super into this, but even HVAC is not like that.
Hayden Slack: It definitely focuses you on customer acquisition when you've got no guarantee.
John Wilson: Yeah, walk me through that. What's the funnel for you guys to just pile up customers?
Hayden Slack: Yeah. So the key metrics that we're checking every day is. How many inbound needs did we set the day before and for the prior week?
Hayden Slack: What our current closing ratio is just to measure sales team effectiveness revenue per lead is a big 1 that we focus on and it varies by market that allows me 2 different things. 1 is that measures apples to apples against salesman because they're running different types of leads, whether it's slab or.
Hayden Slack: And it really lets us know,
Hayden Slack: How much money we're going to get back based on each rep. And then also I use revenue per lead as a measuring stick for how much I'm willing to spend per opportunity. In DFW, if our revenue per lead is 2500, I know we can spend 250 a call. And we'll stay under that right at that 10 percent of advertising spent to revenue.
Hayden Slack: Gotcha.
John Wilson: What's the marketing stack?
Hayden Slack: Every paper leads to where you can possibly find HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Networks, Thumbtack, local service ads, AdWords. If it's a call, it's coming into a call center. That's booking it into service time. If it's a digital text based lead, all of those are captured via Zapier, dumped into Google Sheets.
Hayden Slack: Twilio sends out a thank you text, letting them know that one of our customer service agents will be reaching out to them, and then it pushes the data into service time via built ins.
John Wilson: And it's all only digital? Are you guys doing radio, TV, like postcards?
Hayden Slack: Almost zero traditional marketing. There is a couple of print sources like the home mag, or there's another one called best paper reports where they have some kind of marketing brochure full of contractors, those still charge us paper leave, even though it's a print model, but no TV, no radio.
Hayden Slack: I've tested some streaming over the top advertisement, and we even did about a 10 month experiment with Fox4 and DFW. But none of those did I feel like we really had much return. If we can't measure it, I don't really like it. But I know it worked for some people.
John Wilson: Yeah, so I'm fascinated by this. You have to spend almost a million dollars a month.
John Wilson: Sorry, not a million dollars a month. You spend what a million a year on PPC?
Hayden Slack: Oh, yeah, I mean our advertising budget will probably 1. million dollars
John Wilson: Yeah
Hayden Slack: for 2022.
John Wilson: That's wild. That is fascinating. I guess I expected more traditional in there I don't know if it's good or bad. I just expected it. Yeah I'm
Brandon Niro (2): certain
Hayden Slack: There is a way to make that work.
Hayden Slack: It's just i'm not really a marketing guy And even though I still sit in the marketing function for the business, the only way I can know it's effective is if I can logically work through the math on it. And so that's just pushed me away from the traditional marketing where they're going to, are your organic traffic is going to increase your click through rates are going to go up.
Hayden Slack: I'm like, yeah, I agree that is likely. The way I will know, but I still don't feel good about it.
John Wilson: Yeah. We've always just struggled. I'm not a marketing person either. Like we grow through M and a cause I find that easier. Yeah. So our issue with was pay per click didn't seem to scale. Like cost per lead doesn't go down.
John Wilson: The more you spend, it just. Might even go up because you're spending more. It's yeah. Just didn't seem to scale the way we thought and it didn't seem to brand build the way we thought, but then, so we started adding more traditional. And then the other downside is our average tickets, not 8, 500. That gets you some freaking firepower to do whatever you feel like you need to do.
Hayden Slack: It does. It does. Having a super high ticket covers up a lot of sins because you can catch back up real quick, which has been, one of the difficulties with the plumbing business is when you know, your guys are have an average ticket of 350 bucks. The math doesn't make sense to go buy the next opportunity.
Hayden Slack: Thank you. So you have to focus on training them and coaching them to a point where the math does make sense that you can go spend the money on marketing and they'll actually return it as business.
John Wilson: Yeah, how does marketing currently work with, are you marketing at all for the plumbing company or is it all organic?
Hayden Slack: Very little. We're part of the LSA platform for the plumbing business. But unlike the foundation of a career business, it does not generate many opportunities. I think it's just a much more crowded market. There's probably 70 plumbing companies on LSAs in my area. Yeah, we'll do a little bit of home advisor, Angie's list.
Hayden Slack: There's one in my market called good contractors list, and they started the model of. We'll vet these contractors according to our principles, and then we'll back them with a 10, 000 guarantee on their job. And that one works out pretty well for the plumbing business. Getting our next customer has not been a problem.
Hayden Slack: I feel like we still have a lot of levers to pull to grow that way. It's really just can we find recruit and train texts?
John Wilson: Yeah,
Hayden Slack: and not only are they good plumbers, but are they good people? And good teammates. That's been much more difficult.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I can get that. What we're finding with multiple businesses is because there's one brand, our largest brand carries like the brunt of our marketing efforts, like seven, 8 percent of revenue, but some of the other brands have absolutely no marketing at all because they either sit off to the side of the large brand and they soak up excess leads that sort of overflow, or they, Had a bunch of like we bought three deals last year and none of them did an ounce of marketing like not a penny Which is crazy.
John Wilson: So then we were able to just come in and we haven't even started marketing on them yet We've just been like doing best practices raising pricing doing all the stuff that you know They needed to do and they've grown and we still haven't even had to market so like that's been a wild So on one business i'm like, oh my god, we spend so much on marketing And cost per lead sucks and all this, but then you find out same as what you're finding out with plumbing doesn't need to market at all because you spend so much freaking money on
Hayden Slack: the other companies.
Hayden Slack: What is your initial reaction when you're meeting sellers and they go, I don't do any marketing. I work by referral only.
John Wilson: What is my usual reaction? I know that we're charging too low. And I guess I see it as a bad thing. I probably see it as a bad thing.
Hayden Slack: Yeah, I usually see it negatively. And most of the time it's delivered to me in like a pat on my back.
Hayden Slack: I don't even need to do marketing. And my initial reaction is you obviously aren't wanting to grow.
John Wilson: Yeah, I think there's a lot more to it. I think there's a lot more to it than that. I don't know, like, how good's the brand? And if you're buying a name if someone bought our largest brand, they're buying millions and millions of dollars of brand building activity that went into that brand.
John Wilson: Not just the five star reviews, but they're buying the equity that we've gained from TV and radio and mailers for And that's huge. That's hugely valuable. When I find out a brand hasn't really advertised at all, or they only use PPC, because that's not really a brand builder to me, Then I'm like I don't know how I feel about this one.
John Wilson: This might not be a good fit. Or if it is a good fit, how can they even handle marketing? Can they handle 8 percent budget going to something new?
Hayden Slack: Yeah. And the answer is likely.
John Wilson: No, yeah,
Hayden Slack: probably can't afford it.
John Wilson: Yeah, because they're charging too low. It all but yeah, the initial take is oh, you guys are charging too low.
John Wilson: You already know what's going on there. There's some loose ends, but usually they're small and if they're not marketing, that means they don't have a bunch of other stuff figured out. Because if you're not spending anything on marketing and that's your only company, then you're running like a tenth of a company.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's my quick take, but yeah, it usually is delivered with yeah, we don't even need to market. And I'm like, yeah, you probably do. You just don't know yet. Yeah, when you've been looking what size you guys looking for?
Hayden Slack: I lean towards SBA loan. Because I agree that there's gonna be less risk with more people or just losing one key Employee and all of a sudden you've lost half your business that you just bought.
John Wilson: Yeah, does your father in law own any of the plumbing company? So would this be like a co venture or would this just be on your own?
Hayden Slack: Probably going to be on my own. He's at a point in life where he's just enjoying life. He doesn't really have any interest in what his next opportunity is.
John Wilson: You can tell me if this is off limits, but how do you handle running your father in law's company and running your own company too?
John Wilson: Is that a conflict? Like, how's that work?
Hayden Slack: It can be, it presents scenarios where. I don't think moral hazard is the right word, you're conflicted between do I, can I do right by both entities and motivations? Can I maximize the opportunity of the foundation company and the plumbing business at the same time?
Hayden Slack: And the answer can be yes. And it could be no, no one else is going to do it. So I just show up every day.
John Wilson: How do you move to the next part? What would the dream scenario be? Before you own control all of it.
Hayden Slack: Yeah. During 2021, we started implementing EOS set out to build a management team.
Hayden Slack: So at this point, the accounting seat is filled operations, sales manager. I still sit in the marketing position and integrator. So if I can find someone to handle the marketing to where that opens up my, excess time, just finding the next acquisition and doing the same thing I've done with plumbing.
Hayden Slack: News. Building a team and hoping there's enough synergy there to reduce risk and help it grow with the rising tide lifts all ships Concept.
John Wilson: Do you have a visionary on the team?
Hayden Slack: Not really and
John Wilson: I'm not super
Hayden Slack: big into titles and I think it's useful
John Wilson: You're the one that used EOA I'm just going what you're giving me yeah,
Hayden Slack: maybe it's just a natural dislike of Calling myself a visionary.
John Wilson: I definitely have that natural dislike too. That is like the single worst title that they could have given that position. During the first two or three meetings of onboarding into EOS, I was like, I'm not calling myself that. So we came up with a new one.
Hayden Slack: What is yours? Maybe
John Wilson: I'll call myself that.
John Wilson: Allocator. Okay, yeah,
Hayden Slack: that sounds less pretentious. So
John Wilson: A little bit less. Yeah, but so right now you're sitting in the integrator seat and no one's sitting in the E. O. S. visionary seat as you see it.
Hayden Slack: Correct.
John Wilson: Just from this conversation, it seems like you're a strong integrator. That feels like a good seat for you.
John Wilson: So do you think you move back to the visionary seat or do you try to recruit the visionary?
Hayden Slack: I'm not sure. The part of business I enjoy is the high level strategy. What are we going to do next? But by necessity Make the plan work. Yeah, make the plan work. By necessity I sit where I'm at. And so I think in the future, if I can hire someone to take the integrator role, that's fine.
Hayden Slack: I try not to let my ego get tied up with, we're doing it this way because it's my way, or it was my idea, or I'm the one that has to do this. I don't mind letting other people do anything as long as it's effective.
John Wilson: So do you think you would be willing to stay in the integrator role and recruit a visionary?
Hayden Slack: No, I'd rather recruit an integrator and step back to The visionary role, the allocator role. Nice.
John Wilson: It's much better. It's a much better name. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not just allocating money. It's talent attention. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking back to what you said at the beginning of the call, but I find it fascinating how whoever's at the top.
John Wilson: So in my case, me. In your case, you, wherever your attention gets directed, becomes like things happen, things just start happening. I'm not even really sure where I was going with that. Probably you stepping back into strategy.
Hayden Slack: Yeah. Because we've never, seven years ago, I didn't sit down and model out what it would look like to get to 20 and a half million dollars.
Hayden Slack: It's just been every day, incremental progress across a wide range of the business. And then we look up seven years later and we've got more reviews than anybody in the industry and have grown four times. So it's worked without an official visionary.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes you read those books and implement like we're implementing too.
John Wilson: And you wonder what the right, it's just like any job position, right? So right now we need someone to head up our finance. I'm heading up our finance cause I've really struggled getting the right people in that seat. There's going to be a point where that's the absolute worst decision in the world that I'm still heading up finance.
John Wilson: And it's probably coming up soon, but like for now it still works. And I would have to imagine that's the same thing with the, like the duality of running a company, the visionary integrator piece for us, it was really early. Because I am such I can't, incremental progress just bores the hell out of me.
John Wilson: I was making a huge mess, so I needed an integrator way earlier. Because I would have been a nightmare. But, if you're a strong integrator, yeah, you probably don't. Like you probably don't need this second half for a long time. You could probably just keep going.
Hayden Slack: That's my plan. Just going to keep going.
John Wilson: Yeah. It sounds like a good plan.
Hayden Slack: Yeah.
John Wilson: Cool. All right. You're starting to look for deals. Plumbing's working out. You've got the foundation repair business going. What else is on your radar? We
Hayden Slack: toured with the idea of getting into foam injection. Which is a like insulation. No, it's a substitute for foundation repair.
Hayden Slack: It's using polyurethane foam To lift homes, it would be an added service for gl hunt But i'm not sure how much of a market there is for it and then I just really like the idea of hvac and it just might be shiny object syndrome because Your average tickets are going to be a lot higher than your standard plumbing calls, and I like the sales and marketing
John Wilson: So you would do yeah, probably pretty well with HVAC I would actually say it's probably easier for you to go to HVAC From foundation than it is for me to go to HVAC from plumbing because plumbing is so focused on just Like average ticket average ticket.
John Wilson: Whereas HVAC like we're having to learn how to market for HVAC right now Which is all about replacement leads and like you've got that down and we don't like we're really struggling on that aspect of our business because it's totally different than plumbing and drains and all that stuff where, you got to spend minimally.
John Wilson: It's mainly brand building to get people to call you whenever the drain backs up versus HPC where it's just. Barraging people with 9, 000 opportunities.
Hayden Slack: Have you worked with any sales organizations? Nope. Probably should. I've worked with a few. The one we worked with recently is a guy named Joe Crisera.
Hayden Slack: Have you ever heard of him?
John Wilson: Nope. I'm writing it down though.
Hayden Slack: Yeah. It's called Pure Motive Service. And so he's got a whole kind of philosophy around providing customers with the highest level of customer service. As kind of your sales text motivation, but then the tactical aspect of it is he's taken the good, better, best model and turned it into six options instead of three ranging from just your bare minimum band aid repair up to the highest possible solution you could give someone.
Hayden Slack: And he goes into a little bit of seller buyer psychology. Around options and how that funnels people towards the middle options that you give. We've probably implemented 70 percent of it with gl hunt since october 2019 And it's had an impact on average sale by 15 or 20
John Wilson: Nice Yeah, that's cool. Pure motive service.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's great. We just brought someone on to run our HVAC just because again, we're so built on like Brandon's backgrounds landscaping, which is repeat to the max, right? And our background is plumbing and just totally different from HVAC. So if you're strong with marketing, HVAC is great. If you're not and you grow through M& A like this lazy guy here, then yeah, HVAC is a lot tougher.
John Wilson: All right, sweet. I'm gonna check this out. Your most service. That's dope. Cool. All right. We usually end every episode with this one question. So I'm going to hit you with it, man. What's your single biggest challenge right now?
Hayden Slack: Oh, hiring is still our biggest challenge. We don't have a recruiter and so we spread the hiring process across a couple of people.
John Wilson: That's tough. That's already tough. Like
Hayden Slack: it's just a huge time sink reviewing resumes and initial reviews. And in this market, it's just difficult to even get people to show up. We still have no shows constantly. And then for the marketing position I'm looking for, I'm sure you've interacted with enough marketing agencies.
Hayden Slack: To realize like I mean if you and I were to go start a marketing company tomorrow We know enough of the lingo to convince aging baby boomers that we know what we're doing, right?
John Wilson: Yeah, not complicated
Hayden Slack: Yeah, so and your applicants can talk the talk but how many of them can actually do the work? So it's just hard to find someone and really gauge their competency for that specific position.
John Wilson: Yeah, those are two big challenges for sure. This was awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you for having me. If people want to get a hold of you, where can they find you?
Hayden Slack: I guess you can find me on Twitter. Like I said when we started, I've been a professional lurker. And so being on Twitter and participating has been exciting.
Hayden Slack: We've met 10 or 15 guys over the last 2 or 3 months for coffee, lunch. We've And I didn't know any of them. So yeah, reach out to me on Twitter. I'm pretty much an open book. You can talk about whatever you want.
John Wilson: Awesome. Thanks. This was great, Hayden. Thank you.
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