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The start of a new era of Owned and Operated! In this pilot episode of “Owned and Operated”, John Wilson is talking to Jack Carr about his history and how interesting his life adventure was that led him to a residential HVAC commercial company in Nashville. We will get to know his strategies for building his team, and we will see how Jack considers revenue generation if he’s not bringing people in. Why did Jack buy this business if they had no marketing?
What can you expect from our podcast? We will be exploring the ways in which businesses can use B2B and B2C strategies together to achieve their marketing goals, and why an integrated approach to marketing is often the most effective. So whether you're a business owner, marketer, or just curious about the world of B2B and B2C, join us for this introductory episode of our podcast, where we'll explore the basics of these two types of businesses and the essential role they play in the modern economy.
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
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Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers: https://www.servicescalers.com
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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
https://www.wilsonplumbingandheating.com
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
https://rapidhvactn.com
Episode 52 Transcript
John Wilson: Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today I have Jack Carr on with us. Jack Carr I'm pretty excited about. We've gotten to know each other recently and he's going to be joining me as the co host here on Owned and Operated and we're going to be going A little bit of a new direction. So welcome Jack.
Jack Carr: Appreciate it, John. So I think that there's a huge opportunity for podcasts and specifically media in general that revolves around the trade industry. There's not a lot out there that focus on trades and service in a residential or commercial standpoint. And so I think having some information out there that will.
Jack Carr: Kind of bring it to the forefront. It'll be fun. It'll be fun. And it'll provide a lot of value for all of our listeners.
John Wilson: Yeah, I think so too. No, this would be cool. We're going to spend this first episode with Jack, just getting to know him a little bit more, his company a little bit, diving into his history.
John Wilson: That way we get an idea where you're coming from. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. How about you give us the, like the minute primer on Jack Carr.
Jack Carr: Okay. There's, I've always live my life around doing some kind of crazy or strange things. And so there's so many good topics I want to touch on, but I'll go fast.
Jack Carr: So I started my career in facilities, maintenance and engineering for fortune 500 companies like Frito Lay, PepsiCo, really big operations running a lot of their service lines. And after a time I got really tired of that. It was that your typical Kind of corporate job, great experience, but not for me.
Jack Carr: And so I ended up heading up to the Napa Valley, California, took a huge pay cut to instead of run 1400 engineering and facilities departments run wineries, winery maintenance, winery facility, winery engineering. And started off at the bottom as a supervisor and moved my way all the way up eventually into the operations director for different portfolios, managing everything that wasn't specifically winemaking the winemaking process for 9 different wineries. From there, I always have an itch to keep as many of you probably do as well to keep trying things and to keep building and to the entrepreneurial spirit, if you will. And I had a failed venture actually making wine, which is a great story we might get into. But in addition to that failed venture also had a Bitcoin mining farm that we ended up selling in 2021 for.
Jack Carr: late 2020 for a great deal, as you can imagine, on the swing of things, as well as started a small mobile maintenance company for agricultural equipment in the valley and built it up to three trucks, sold that. And then at that time, it was about mid 2020, my wife and I said, let's go travel the country.
Jack Carr: kind of COVID being the big push on that. We bought a 40 foot trailer, decked it out, got a F 250 long bed, double cab, the whole nine, me, her, and my son. And on the day we were going to leave, My wife comes up to me and says, Jack, this is pre HVAC, Jack, by the way she goes, I'm pregnant. And I go, oh, okay, that's fine.
Jack Carr: It wasn't the exact time we wanted, but we were planning on having another 1 in the future. And so we do about 2 months where we get 4 or 5 states under our belt and she says, I'm going to go handle this ultrasound alone. She comes back and she goes, oh, it's twins. So we don't have twins in our family on either side.
Jack Carr: I would just went from a family of three to a family of five real quick. And so I said, Hey let's take the time, settle in somewhere, nest a bit, and we'll start kind of life again. And so I'm always very risk adverse for being an entrepreneur, which is an interesting kind of dichotomy. But with that, I decided, Hey, I want, I don't want something that if there's a recession in any way, shape or form, that's going to hurt us as business.
Jack Carr: Here bankrupt us. And so I said the trades, I have a trade background. I've done everything from electrical plumbing. HVAC while doing facilities maintenance,
Jack Carr: and so we were looking at trades. I almost bought a appliance company, appliance repair company here, almost bought a commercial HVAC company, and then ended up finding a residential HVAC company here in Nashville, Tennessee. So we ended up in Nashville, and we've been running Rapid Response ever since, which is a residential heating and cooling company.
Jack Carr: Your basic residential company, we're going to do hopefully about 1. 5 this year in gross we've been tucking in small businesses here and there we've tucked into we're going to potentially look at buying some other horizontal integration other companies that you and I've talked about off offline that will be interesting.
Jack Carr: So more to come.
John Wilson: Yeah. So when did you buy? You gave me the history. What was the year timeline that you bought the HVAC company?
Jack Carr: So we had an extremely quick close I went ahead in April of 2022. Put in my LOI, we were closed within 60 days in July. 13th on July 13th. I filled up a U-Haul, drove everything out here on July 12th.
Jack Carr: Moved everything in on July the night of July 12th, and then started July 13th. So it was real quick. And then we've been running it ever since with some great booms to the business. We, I think December we had 300% year over year growth. Just crazy growth. . So it's been a wonderful experience so far.
John Wilson: That's great. So with, um. What was the financing source?
Jack Carr: So we did SBA just typical, I think the only kind of weird creative financing that we did with the SBA was a little bit of a seller note but we got a really good deal on it. I think we paid 2. 4 X and so we're having. We paid 2.
Jack Carr: 4 X and it was a decent deal. And we've done some much better deals since, but for a nice platform company is it was on the smaller side. There were three employees, two out of three have already quit. It was definitely an interesting buying experience. And we in the industry and on SMB, Twitter and everything like that, talk a lot about how you really want to buy with a million dollars in EBITDA and all this kind of stuff.
Jack Carr: We did the exact opposite. We bought. At about 280, 000 in EBITDA. But with my background, I was able to jump in and hire quickly and run calls that needed to be ran. Now I don't run calls anymore. So you have a
John Wilson: technical background, like you can touch stuff.
Jack Carr: Yeah. There was about two months where I was running as the owner and as an operator and as a tech.
John Wilson: Oh, that's interesting.
Jack Carr: Yeah, it was really bad luck. The old owner didn't do the normal thing of waiting until closed to tell his employees and tell everybody. So he actually told. The parts warehouse prior to closing the parts people told his employees before he told them and it left a pretty sour taste in their mouth on transition.
Jack Carr: So we lost, like I said, two out of three on transition. So just real bad luck. And so that's a quick tip is if you have a seller, make sure he's not telling anybody prior to close. You want to be the first one to be there and reassure employees that, Hey, I'm going to come in. I'm not going to change anything all that quickly.
Jack Carr: Your pay's all going to be the same or better, just the normal stuff that most transitions do.
John Wilson: All right. So you took it over. What happened after you had to hire people,
Jack Carr: yeah. Yeah. So right away, I took over day one, one guy quit. I didn't even get to talk to him. Nothing. He wouldn't return my calls, wouldn't do anything.
Jack Carr: So we were running a man short. And by the way, this is July. So we're in busy season. Luckily, the owner, the old owner was a tech as well. And I had a month with him at, working on the business transition. So he was actually able to jump in as well. It was it was really. convenient in the sense that he knows HVAC.
Jack Carr: He's been running this business. He's been owner operating. So he was able to act as a tech in the meantime. And then about two out of those three weeks in, I realized that this business isn't all that his business, specifically my HVAC in general, but his business wasn't all that complicated. I learned the systems that he had in place.
Jack Carr: I knew what I was going to change. I ran as a tech. I kept him on running as a tech as well and just paid him a little bit commission on sales and service. And then a week after that, he was out. But in that intermediate time, I was already hiring. So we ended up getting someone, I think, a week after he left.
Jack Carr: And then shortly after, I think getting once again, another wonderful story of having employees. I had an employee dropped my van off two hours away and quit
John Wilson: a
Jack Carr: few weeks later after that. So it's been a whirlwind, especially the hiring side. We've got a good team now. I have three techs total, a CSR and two VAs who run after our calls. They do CSR work at nights and weekends, and then they also do warranty work and they do some stuff for my other acquisitions. They just are all around catch all when it's cause we don't get that many calls overnight. So they have a little bit of extra time.
John Wilson: All right. So it had three texts when you bought it.
Jack Carr: Yep.
John Wilson: Most of them are not there. But you're back up to three techs.
Jack Carr: Correct. And it's allowed me to move back into a position where I can focus on looking at acquisitions of smaller businesses.
John Wilson: Yeah. So you said you did a couple of these talks, but what did they add? Did they, did any of them add texts or was it mainly just a phone number or what was the goal?
Jack Carr: Yeah. So one of our. One of our acquisitions, when we had two texts, we actually were able to pick up the third tech from the acquisition. We let one of them go, we picked up the better one. Um, he was fit right in with the team. It was amazing. So he's been wonderful. We've been one of my favorite employees to work with, but mostly we were just picking up their phone number the list of people.
Jack Carr: There wasn't really any. Yeah. Excuse me, not people clients, there wasn't too much, there wasn't too many assets on the books. I think we got a van out of one of them, which we flipped. We didn't even keep that van high mileage type deal. And then one of the first acquisition was gross. It came in at around 600, 000.
Jack Carr: And net was his books weren't the greatest. Gross is easy to find and calculate, but the net side wasn't just because he didn't track expenses all that well small owner operator type deal with 1, 1 or 2 helpers and So you could estimate 30 to maybe 20 to 30 percent margins on that.
Jack Carr: So he was probably somewhere in the a hundred to 200, 000 net range. We picked that up for 12, 000. So it was a great buy. He was moving out to Maine and it was the day before he was moving. So I need to offload this Jack. I, I don't know what to do. I don't my, he was, what was nice was he was more worried about his customers, right?
Jack Carr: Not them not having a place to call and them not having a place to go warranty issues, things like that. So that's why we got it. So cheap and he's been a great trend owner to transition with honestly. And then the other 1 was a small. Really small 211, 000 gross, about 30 net. And we picked that up for just under one X of net and that no people, no acquis, no vehicles, there were some tools he wanted to offload, but really we just wanted the phone number and the 268 clients or so that he had.
John Wilson: Yeah. So when you're thinking about these tuck ins. You bought it at, you were guys were 1. 2 or three, and then you added 800, 000. Correct. How are you thinking about like revenue generation? Cause it added all together. You should be in the twos, but since you're not bringing over people or anything like that, how are you thinking about that?
Jack Carr: Yeah, the expectation is we actually underwrite all these at 50%. So if we lose 50 percent of the clients, especially on the smaller owner operator deals, a lot of people like working with owner operators versus big companies, because they feel like they have their guy. It's this is the guy call.
Jack Carr: It's his personal number, it's that kind of deal. And so we expect to lose customers. Not all of them, maybe 50%. I'm so far on these 2, we've only lost maybe 18 on the 1st, 1 and 22 ish on the 2nd, 1, we try to incentivize them to stay along with free maintenances and whatnot. And then the idea is.
Jack Carr: That if we keep that 50%, like you said, 800, 000, we're expecting maybe 400, 000 in additional revenue that comes in. And so that would put us about 1. 5, 1. 6. If anything more, that's great, but we try to underwrite it and pay these people based on that. The best part of it though is there's very little competition.
Jack Carr: All the private equity firms, they're not looking at, Joe Schmoe in a van who does 211, 000 a year. They want the 1 million EBITDA companies that everyone else is vying for.
John Wilson: So when you're taking them over are you integrating are you downloading their stuff into yours?
John Wilson: Merging databases?
Jack Carr: Yeah, it's mostly they most have QuickBooks. That's what we find is a lot of QuickBooks. And that's pretty easy to transfer over. Everything else is pen and paper. I draw a parallel to kind of some of these guys doing, storage roll ups, right? They go to these mom and pop storage roles who are still doing fax machine type stuff.
Jack Carr: We're doing the same thing. We're just going to the guys who they have a phone number. That pen and paper, they do invoices on pen and paper, and then we integrate their clients into our system. We're calling them. We're texting them. We're emailing them and we're finding that most of the time. They have a really good response rate.
Jack Carr: They like the additional attention. They're getting. Additional reminders that, hey, you know your units like a car in the sense that it needs to be maintained. And a lot of homeowners don't look at it like that. They just think of it like a door or something else or a window where you set it and forget it.
Jack Carr: But we try to remind them. Hey, it's a mechanical piece. It needs maintenance. It needs its oil change, if you will every couple of months. And you Yeah, it's been, it's really been a good experience. We're still chopping at that block. We're going to keep chopping at that block. It does break our systems every time, but not as bad as buying in an equal sized business
John Wilson: to what we have.
John Wilson: Yeah. Why? Like, why do you think an equal size business would break it?
Jack Carr: I think that just if we were to bring on another Fortex and to bring on an additional thousand customers versus 200 customers or so, I think that trying to line everything up and get them to work on our databases and our systems.
Jack Carr: So we aren't using service Titan just yet. We're going to switch over eventually. But we do have a very, I've used service Titan in the past, so I like it. It's streamlined. It's great. But we, at this point, due to the initial costs of startup will not start up a purchase and then trying to line the business out stabilize it.
Jack Carr: We haven't switched over yet and because of that, we use a series of. Inefficient systems that work together, but are still not streamlined just yet.
John Wilson: Okay.
Jack Carr: We also do some other kind of quirky stuff. Like we have a small shop that we work out of, but most of what we work out of are a series of storage units, for example. So we have strategically placed storage units that carry parts pieces have a small inventory that Then shows up on Google drive and is maintained by the VAs.
Jack Carr: So it's stuff like that, where if you added another four or five people going into those storage units in different locations constantly, and they're forgetting to update the VAs with inventory or things of that nature. I think that a lot of this would fall apart pretty quickly. Truly break the system to a point where we would actually have to figure out something else.
Jack Carr: So that's one of the good examples. I think that would come first.
John Wilson: Yeah, what was the storage unit idea? Was that in the business when you bought it or did you add that?
Jack Carr: No, I added it. I was tired of having my texts run 40 minutes up to Nashville and 40 minutes back down for a capacitor. It's a 12, 14, 18 part, whatever it may be.
Jack Carr: That drives me crazy to have to either order it in, potentially lose the customer waiting a day, two days for that part to get in and then schedule them again. It just felt like a lot of touches versus if the tax were in a
John Wilson: rural, then Like your headquarters is rural,
Jack Carr: not necessarily. So our headquarters is 30 minutes South of Nashville. Most of our clients are in Brentwood, Franklin, Williamson County area. But the problem is that all the parts warehouses are in Nashville. And so it's not that we're rural. It's just that the parts warehouses are all centrally located in pretty much one spot, 30 minutes North or 30 minutes South. So it takes them an hour to grab these small parts and pieces versus us keeping them regularly stocked and letting us know when they use it.
Jack Carr: And then at the end of the day, they come back in, grab two or three of whatever they've used or need, and they should be fine for the next day or so until they need to stop by the warehouses again.
John Wilson: So you're, I'm looking at Google maps. I'm like, let's I'm curious. This is interesting.
John Wilson: So like you're in Brentwood. All right. I see that. So what's 30 minutes South.
Jack Carr: In lower Franklin, there is a small, it's a small subset of the, Ferguson a parts warehouse, but it's like the smaller version of it. So they don't generally have everything all the time. And there's another 1 in Murfreesboro, which is 45 minutes South.
John Wilson: Yeah,
Jack Carr: and then North right at the very South end of the city of Nashville is where pretty much all the rest of the parts warehouses are. Yeah.
John Wilson: Okay. Is Franklin or Murfsboro Thompson station are these population hubs or are they like, not really?
Jack Carr: Not really. Franklin is Brentwood is Nolensville to the east of it is, but if you go really south towards Spring Hill and that Thompson station area, the population drops dramatically.
John Wilson: So are most of your customers, would you consider them a part of Nashville like Nashville proper.
Jack Carr: Yeah. There's a dividing line between Davidson County and Williamson County. We like to say we're primarily Williamson County. So 1 of the main reasons I purchased this business in particular was they had no website.
Jack Carr: They had no advertising, no marketing yet 1 for Google SEO, but not Top of page, but top of that contractor section. So when you were in Brent, we're searching for, cooling or heating needs. We were the number 1, which is great because all we had to do was go and add LSA and then actually build a website and start trying to get onto page 1, which shout out to Dan wolf.
Jack Carr: We've gotten onto page 1 with a few keywords already. So it's been really helpful in driving traffic.
John Wilson: Yeah,
Jack Carr: but to answer you have a long story short,
John Wilson: I think you have an interesting so we were the same, like we're in Akron and Akron is like a somewhat. It's not small, like our county is like 800, 000 population, which is apparently about the size of Nashville.
John Wilson: I looked it up. But we're 30 minutes south of Cleveland. And that was always like, there was always a big dividing line, but like Cleveland's population is like 3. 2 million. So for us, it became like a strategic plan to eventually transition as much up to Cleveland as possible, because frankly, there's just too much.
John Wilson: Four times the population, like we could just do more. So I, I don't know, I've talked to, or I've looked at a lot of deals just all over Ohio. And I always think it's interesting. These, like the companies that are 20 or 30 minutes from like a population hub, but they don't serve the population hub.
John Wilson: And I'm always like, that's. You're like, you're perfectly positioned to serve a huge job with, and if you're more rural, then you probably have a greater workforce. There's more going on there. So do you guys think you'll eventually start taking down Nashville?
Jack Carr: Yeah. So we take, we have, I'd say our, Split right is probably 80 percent Williamson County, 20 percent Nashville.
Jack Carr: So it's not that we don't go after Nashville. The question for you is, would you prefer to be a big fish in a small pond or small pot or a Small fish in a big pond. Small fish for
John Wilson: sure.
Jack Carr: Yeah. And so that's where it comes down to is we're in Williamson County and South of Williamson County.
Jack Carr: We are fighting other small fish right now versus if we tried to go and push into Nashville or you tried to push into Cleveland. You run into, Hey we're going up against companies. The governor, I think of the state owns a HVAC company in Nashville. And their marketing budget is probably bigger than our gross revenue. And so they're all they're plastered across everything. All the billboards up there are all HVAC companies. You start to move away from that. I think there's a good balance of, hey, we're right on the border. We can serve them. But right now, our focus really is our county, our area. What our strategy has been is all the companies that we have purchased are east of us.
Jack Carr: So they're, I don't think they're willing to county. I think they're technically Davidson County, Nashville area. But they're across this, I guess there's 2 parallel freeways and there's this. Big expanse of rural county roads and then on the other side of that is a few more cities. That's Murfreesboro, Laverne, Antioch.
Jack Carr: And so the 2 companies that we've purchased are actually over there. And so what we're trying to do is instead of expand vertically into Nashville, we're expanding horizontally across and taking all those customers. I think the move for us is to just continue in that area until we really feel like we're not.
Jack Carr: And to really feel like we're not able to pick up any more customers or any more businesses and then we will. But for the moment being, it's been a really good accelerated way to to grow.
John Wilson: Yeah. That's interesting. The governor owns an HVAC company there.
Jack Carr: Oh yeah. Yeah. That's what's the name?
Jack Carr: It's Lee company. So there's about, I would say four or five. 30 million plus companies in Nashville that are all, they're in our area too, but primarily Nashville is where they do a lot of their work. Oh my gosh.
John Wilson: That's funny. Yeah. Wow. They do. They're on their website and it's we do it all and they do it all.
John Wilson: They have like painting and remodeling and appliance repair. Jesus, somebody was distracted. I wonder and then they have a commercial facility division. Oh my god, like why? Why did they do all this? This is so confusing. Apparently they work on, at escalators.
Jack Carr: Yeah. You should see the back of their trucks.
Jack Carr: What would they need to do that for? They have on the back of their trucks, they have to write in such small fine print because they have all of those items on there just across the bed of the truck and it takes up the entire thing. It's absolutely wonderful. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. I see that now. Yeah,
John Wilson: the goal was,
Jack Carr: I don't know, but they do have market share.
Jack Carr: So I don't know if they were one of the first in the area or how it was. Like I said, I'm on a transplant, so I don't know how that progression happened, but apparently that lead company Hiller, and now we have some other big kind of PE backed firms moving into the area. Cool Ray has slapped up probably 40, 50 billboards recently, and they've been expanding nobody's business.
Jack Carr: So we, like I said, we stay away and it fits our business really well. Once we get bigger, we might expand as well into kind of those auxiliary trades or maybe not auxiliary, but beneficial plumbing, electrical. Once you start getting the licenses in Tennessee to it, they all work together.
Jack Carr: So you can get the HVAC license, which is what we have. But it's a really easy test to get the HVAC and plumbing license. And then you have to get the electrical license to do installations here in Texas or Tennessee. And so we ended up getting all three of our needs met by just doing normal HVAC work.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. All right. So you're going to keep doing tuck ins. You're going to keep moving East which is just South of Of Nashville here. Cool. So what else have you implemented? You added warehouses these sub warehouse things, website, Google LSA. What else did you start adding in?
Jack Carr: Yeah. The VAs are a huge one. They've been able to free up a ton of time for us. It's actually made us a 24, seven outfit in the sense that we have people answering the phones 24, seven, which has been huge. I mean, the customers that they're not, as I mentioned, there's not a ton of them that call at night, but the ones that do call at night and are able to talk to someone or get ahold of someone that says, Hey, do X, Y, and Z for now.
Jack Carr: We'll get back to you in the morning or we'll get someone out there tonight if it's an emergency. Those customers end up for the most part being really sticky customers. They stay with us for a long time. A lot of trust is built almost instantly there because it can get pretty busy here in summer. We have 90 degree weeks with 90 percent humidity and it's busy.
Jack Carr: And so when your A. C. goes out, you really need someone there, especially if you have small kids in your house or whatever the case may be. So that's been huge for us. The other big thing we've added that's grown the business is I just had to my tongue SEO. I said We'll cut this part,
John Wilson: keep this part for sure.
John Wilson: Yeah, this is me blanking on what I just had something. Oh, goodness me.
Jack Carr: We did full rebranding, which was huge in my opinion.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: Well,
John Wilson: the trucks look great. I saw those. On the googs. Yeah, they look great.
Jack Carr: We're actually getting it. So that's the last part. That's where we don't run those green trucks anymore, actually.
John Wilson: All right. So what do you got now?
Jack Carr: So it's just a different, so I was looking at the back of that truck and there's the HVAC gauges and it's a little guy. He's doing his dance, but the average individual homeowner doesn't know what an HVAC gauge is, doesn't know what that means, doesn't know anything.
Jack Carr: So we've switched to that same idea, but just a fan. So it's a fan as a person. Nice blue, the typical blue, red, white change the logo. So we've really pushed that and that's been, it's
John Wilson: been huge. I actually got one of the cards over here. So
Jack Carr: see, yeah, that looks pretty good. So it's changed the websites like that as well.
Jack Carr: So that rebranding has been. a big win. We found that customers have really enjoyed that. And then on top of that, just some stylistic changes to the business where we really focus on service first versus the old owner was a really heavy sales first type. Individual and it rubbed people the wrong way and we've had to recover our Google reviews, but we've got them up from about a 4.
Jack Carr: 5 to a 4. 8 with an additional, let's say 70 or 80 reviews in the past seven, eight months.
John Wilson: Yeah. So when you're, when you were at the. Was it at the winery or was it the fortune 500? Wait, where were you getting into facilities maintenance prior? Were you touched HVAC?
Jack Carr: So that's a great question. It was mostly at wineries.
Jack Carr: So at wineries, one of the key aspects to wine is keeping it at the right temperature and that's why you have the wine caves and you have just really heavy emphasis on HVAC. It's commercial. Don't get me wrong, but I think at one point my portfolio, we had 172 million. Dollars worth of wine under cooling at any point in time.
Jack Carr: So if you lose a, a chiller I was in a lot of trouble, so we had a great preventative maintenance program, but the key to that and why I was able to jump into this business and become a tech almost instantaneously, if I need to be, was the key was the refrigeration theory. I was able to pick that up because of my history with refrigeration.
Jack Carr: It all works the same. There's some different aspects, but residential is fairly more simple than commercial at that level. So there's about, 15, 16 moving parts, maybe in the residential HVAC unit versus 150 in a commercial unit. So there's a lot less stress.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like it. All right. So you were able to jump in pretty quick from that.
John Wilson: That's cool.
Jack Carr: Yeah, my EPA, 608, which you have to get when, if you want to be a tech, but also SBA requires it. It was a breeze. The CMC C, which is the contractor's license passed the first time. It's been very beneficial and I get the question a lot like, Hey, Jack, I want to buy an HVAC company.
Jack Carr: How did you get around all that? The real answer is I didn't, I just, I have a small history with it. And so it was, really beneficial moving into this role and buying this type of business.
John Wilson: Yeah, I get that question all the time too. And I'm like, yeah, I have the licenses. I don't know what to tell you.
Jack Carr: Just pull the trigger. The only nice thing I will say about Tennessee, and if you're listening to this and you want to buy an HVAC company and you don't have the history with it that's not, it's not a, don't pass go, don't collect 200 moment. It's just a, Take a step back. I'd first go to your state of wherever you're buying.
Jack Carr: I'd look at the regulation. There's lots of loopholes. There's lots of. I don't know what the word is for it, but there's lots of opportunity when you're reading those regulations to be able to move into a position where you still can buy that company. You still can take over the license or buy the license or even take, take the test yourself, but there are some states that require, 2, 3, 5, 8 years of experience to get those.
Jack Carr: And that's where I would. That's where I would tread carefully. Tennessee is not 1 of those states. We were able to come in. We had a 90 day time frame where I had to, figure it out if I wanted to bid above a certain level and we did. I did, but if you, it's 1 of the hard parts about Tennessee.
Jack Carr: HVAC is, if you're under a certain threshold, you actually, and in certain counties, you don't actually have to have a license. So that's why I always say, start at your state's licensing kind of website first, because there are those small loopholes that allow you to buy in certain areas at certain sizes.
John Wilson: Yeah. What's the goal for the business? What do you, what's the next big thing that you're like, hell yeah, let's do this
Jack Carr: right now. My goal is to get the HVAC company to 3 million gross and then open up a plumbing side. It seems that all my Connections in HPC, they say, hold up until you get to 3 million revenue, and then you can move into plumbing. Plumbing is a gorgeous business too. If the right tuck in came along, it wouldn't technically be a tuck in, but if the right plumbing business came along, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and merge the two.
John Wilson: Yeah. That sounds like a good goal. I love plumbing.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Yeah. It may be a drains company.
John Wilson: Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. Cool. How about we spend a couple minutes talking about what we're hoping to do here with the show? And maybe give a couple ideas. Does that sound like a good place to go? Yeah. Okay. So Jack this started cause you threw out a tweet.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I threw out a tweet asking the essentially the point was, I was trying to find a media company that's been running in this space.
Jack Carr: That's really palatable to the average person who's trying to get into this field. There's not much information outside of Twitter on anybody who. You have the hustle, you have all these entrepreneurial spirited podcasts and media companies that really focus on tech or on Internet businesses.
Jack Carr: But there's nothing out there. In my opinion, that. That focuses around the trades and specifically services. There's a ton of really fun service companies that, I've run into, and I'm searching for businesses to buy all the time that I would just I'd love to own, but, I have focus and so this is a bit of an outlet for me to enjoy those businesses and dig into kind of just service and trades and things that I necessarily can't own, but want to know more about.
Jack Carr: What interested you about that?
John Wilson: We've been like, we took a break from own and operated last year. Life got busy. We had hold co conf we had a bunch of other things going on. And I started thinking about, Hey, we should come back. We should come back online, but I really want to focus on services.
John Wilson: It was the same thing. I think I felt like it would be more interesting to hone in. At the time it was more focused on home services, but I just think, I don't know like you said there's a lot of fun, different things to talk about, and when we first started talking about bringing it back, we were like, Hey, what if we talked about deals or what if we talked about.
John Wilson: Launching them or what if we did launch one and then just talked about how it was going
Jack Carr: That would be fun. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like I have extra time yeah, no problem. Let's just launch a quick service company. But yeah, I just thought it'd be fun to like really hone in.
John Wilson: So yeah tweet resonated with me I'm glad that we're gonna be able to do this. I think this should be I think this should be a lot of fun.
Jack Carr: Yeah, so so What for the listeners, what do you view some of these episodes? What are they going to get out of it?
John Wilson: I think what we're hoping for Is
John Wilson: like excitement. I think that's like a simple joy, right? I think it's fun to brainstorm business ideas in B2B or B2C services. I think that's fun. I think it's interesting to dive into models that you haven't heard of. Like niche stuff like I shared this one with you, but I, in Cleveland last year, there was like a airplane propeller cleaning company.
John Wilson: That thing was wild. Like net margins were like 70%. Like it was absolutely crazy. And I think that there's just like a man that's cool. How do I know more about that? So hopefully we create excitement and hopefully we give people good information and they do something with it.
John Wilson: Either launch something, buy something or share their history with some crazy ass service with us.
Jack Carr: Yeah. And then throughout that, hopefully we can if we have enough excitement about around certain topics, we can bring actual operators and interview them and see what it's actually like running that business, right?
Jack Carr: Because there that's ongoing joke is it's one thing to, to fantasize about running these businesses. And it's another thing to actually run them and the pitfalls and the daily that you have to run So I'm really excited. That was, I think some of the excitement that's revolves around searching and searchers and all this kind of stuff is this excitement of looking at deals and the potential, but I think there's going to be a lot of education too, right?
Jack Carr: On exactly what it's going to stem from that and how these businesses are run and having people explain.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, I think so too. This is gonna be fun. If people want to get ahold of you, follow along with what you're doing, Where can they find you?
Jack Carr: Twitter's the best space. HVAC Jack. It rhymes. It's great.
Jack Carr: Great
John Wilson: handle. I'm building that
Jack Carr: personal brand here. Yeah. I think Greg Grifford he had his buddy drink a bottle of wine last night and just, send me that jingle that I was asking for. And it is the funniest thing we have to figure out how to post it somewhere because it's all about HVAC Jack and heating and cooling your house.
Jack Carr: I'm going, Oh my gosh, this is so wonderful. But HVAC Jack on Twitter. The other spot that potential searchers can reach me at is gold ram ventures. com ran this for a little while. It's still active. We still have a few investments and some capital left. But really we're putting capital towards searchers and startup acquisitions that are in the services industry and my email is on there.
Jack Carr: My direct email. So feel free to reach out.
John Wilson: Thanks, Jack. I'm looking forward to jumping on this with you and next episode will be next week, awesome. All right. I'll see you then.
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