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24 minute read
In this first episode of the Heat Pump Podcast, Eric Fitz and Ed Smith interview Matt Scott, one of the co-owners of Dave's World. Dave's World is the largest heat pump installer in Maine, which has more cold weather heat pumps installed per capita than any other state in the US.
Matt tells the remarkable story of how he first stumbled upon the magic of heat pumps, against the odds and against the advice of a distributor. From there, he describes the entrepreneurial journey he and his partners, Dan and Bob, went on to transform Dave's World from a small appliance store in Dover-Foxcroft to one of the largest heat pump-focused businesses in the country.
Matt discusses the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and some of the special sauce that makes Dave's World a magical place for both their customers and employees.
Show notes
- Dave's World website
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
- The Upside of Fear and The Power of Consistency by Weldon Long
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matt: Then it took off like fire. I mean, everyone would just be like, wow. Like you believe in it that much. And I'm like, absolutely.
[00:00:10] Ed: Hey, Eric.
[00:00:12] Eric: Hey Ed.
[00:00:13] Ed: This is our first heat pump podcast. So we should probably tell folks what it's all about. We're co founders of AmplyEnergy. We make breakthrough software for heat pump installers, and we think heat pumps are how everyone in the country will heat and cool their homes in the future, not just in the South.
As we go into this transition, we want to make sure it goes well for everybody, for the homeowners, for contractors, for the planet. And so in this podcast, we want to cover all things heat pumps. We want to cover the business of heat pumps, the building science, the technology, the policy. And we have a great first guest for our first pod.
[00:00:48] Eric: Yeah. So I'm Eric Fitz. And Ed mentioned, this is our first podcast on the heat pump pod here. And we are so excited to have Matt Scott, one of the owners of Dave's World. They are one of the largest and most successful and earliest installers of cold weather heat pumps in the country. They've got well over a hundred employees, five locations across the state, and practically a hundred trucks on the road.
They are the largest installer in Maine and Maine has more cold weather heat pumps installed per capita than anywhere else in the country.
[00:01:23] Ed: He starts out by telling us the story of how he and Dave's World stumbled upon heat pumps in the first place. It's. It borders on unbelievable. It belongs in a movie. And then he goes on to just tell the entrepreneurial journey of Dave's World, how he and his partners, Dan and Bob, broke through whatever growth plateau they were hitting to just be on, a 15 year, incredible growth run.
It's totally remarkable. A lot of tactical, practical, tangible advice in there for folks who are building heat pump businesses.
[00:01:52] Eric: Yeah. So we really hope that you enjoy the pod, but we want to hear from you. Please let us know what you think on your favorite social channels or send us an email. You can reach us at hello@amply.energy.
[00:02:05] Ed: On to the conversation.
[00:02:10] Ed: Okay. Matt Scott, welcome to the first heat pump podcast. We can't imagine a better guest than you. A lot of people in the heat pump space know Dave's World, but for folks who don't, would you just give us a couple of stats to paint a picture of the size, the scale of Dave's World?
[00:02:25] Matt: It started off with one employee myself that was selling, installing and servicing them. Today we have over 100, I don't know the exact number, but there's over 100 people that are now employed throughout the state.
[00:02:42] Matt: We're working on. We're sitting here in Augusta. I'm sitting here in Augusta. That was just opened in November. And then we have 2 more stores to follow that. We'll have a total of 7 stores throughout the state trying to really cover the entire state and be efficient as far as traveling. There's about 85 vans on the road. Wrapped vans. So that's, it's hard to miss them.
[00:03:07] Eric: Wow, Matt, that's amazing. A hundred employees, you got 85 vans, five locations, and you're soon going to have seven. That's, that is a big business.
[00:03:15] Matt: It's going to continue to grow. Still have a lot of left in the tank and it's just, This work, creating jobs and believing in something that is so good is the fuel for Dave's of World, right? Is it's job creation and getting better paid jobs in Maine. Those are hard to come by.
Maine is a tough state to, to stick around. A lot of the youth go to school here and then they, and they leave. So we're trying to really focus on the trades and help bring that back into our culture. Right.
[00:03:47] Ed: That's awesome. We'd love to go back to the origin when it was just you. Because it's one of the coolest stories I've heard. Would you tell us of how Dave's World got into heat pumps in the first place?
[00:03:58] Matt: Absolutely. I think what happened is that we took HVAC to retail because originally Dave's World was a it's called Dave's World because Dave used to own, back in 1980, the year I was born, he bought Jellison's TV and appliance and turned it into Dave's World. And his idea was to keep people in town.
Spending their money locally and keep that money in the small Dover pool rather than traveling to say Bangor. So when I was 14, I got hired at a small appliance store called Grant's Appliance. Barry Grant, he was my mentor and boss first job, 14, and taught me how to basically work on appliances. And at 16, I was in his vehicle doing house calls.
But during that time he was buying all of Dave's World's used appliances and refurbishing them for landlords and people that can't afford new appliances and found a niche market. So we would go to Dave's World, buy their used stuff, bring it back. I would service it and get it back up and running and refurbish and then sell it.
And that's how that relationship started with myself and Dave's World. Dave's children was running Dave's World alongside his wife. But Bob Jankunas, the CEO of Dave's World now him and I became really good friends.
And he introduced me to downhill mountain biking. So him and I spent a lot of time in a vehicle. We were traveling to New Hampshire, Vermont, Heavy cross country, but That put Bob and I in a car we four and a half hours out go biking all day and then four and a half hours back, get home at midnight, one o'clock in the morning and go to work.
And that whole time we were just dreaming of how far could we take a business that is in such a small town. And we, we were dreamers that, you know, the, if you think it, it can happen, right? So we wanted to prove that, that is a law of attraction is a thing. So we spent a lot of time thinking about it.
And then he, one time we were coming back from, I think Vermont. And he was like, geez, I really wish you would just join our team, merge Scott's appliance with Dave's World. And we'll have a whole division for service. And I said, geez, I've never, I bought this company when I was 18. As soon as I turned 18 and graduated high school, I had bought Grant's Appliance and turned it into Scott's Appliance.
I just said, I can't imagine being a business owner and then giving that up to be an employee. It just didn't make sense to me. And it really wasn't in my DNA. So I jokingly said, you give me, 25 percent of company. Cause back then there was three owners to Dave's children and Bob. He'd been there since he was 16.
I'm not going to share his age, but he's 10 years older than I am.
[00:06:37] Ed: You already said 1980,
[00:06:38] Matt: yeah, So yeah. So I gave that one away. he was like, we'd love to have you. Let me pitch it to my. To my business partners and they were like, yeah let's merge Scott's Appliance with Dave's World.
There was no money exchanged. It was a hundred percent trade just old town, small town, Maine handshake deal.
[00:06:54] Ed: Yeah, love it.
[00:06:55] Matt: yeah, and then we merged it all together. And and then that was that's where the fun began because I'd always been on my own. So always very hands on. Doing all the labor side, but running the business side, I was not great at it.
Just like a lot of people that start a company in the trades they're up at 10 o'clock at night doing the paperwork. And I was relieved to be able to lose that part of it. All I had to do was focus on my craft, Dan and Bob are magic behind the scenes, as far as running the operational side, the structure side where I lacked.
And soon as I came on board. I had felt like I had missed out on what all my friends were doing at that point. I was like, what am I doing? I never went to school. I don't have a degree. I don't have a, something that says I'm somebody, I felt like I was missing out on something.
So the first thing I asked my business partner was like, Hey, do you mind if Dave's World pays for me to go to refrigeration school? Like I know how to do it. I just felt like I needed to go get that degree and Dave's World paid for it.
And I went to night school for months while trying to balance a new marriage with two little kids.
It was a good time.
[00:08:02] Ed: Yeah.
[00:08:03] Matt: During that process I was. I had a budget to go buy from Dan. Dan's my other business partner, Dan Sharrow Dave's son, and he's the CFO. And basically I had a budget to go buy all the new tools to start this new venture. Not only are w e going to do all the appliance repair, but we're gonna to be able to do refrigeration, which is a huge addition to something, a company that was already doing so much. And then I, while I was purchasing my tools, I looked over and I was at a local Johnstone supply.
And I looked over and there was a heat pump display and I, it just caught my eye. And I was like, what is that? I've never seen one of those before. And he says Oh, that's a heat pump. They don't work in Maine. And I'm like what is it? he says it's device that basically removes heat from one place and puts it in another either out or in, and it just grabbed me for some reason, And I asked more questions about it.
And he was, and I was like, why do you have one if they don't work? And I just, for some reason, I was like, put it in the van. And it wasn't, and it swallowed a lot of that budget. And I was fresh partner. I was still being a cowboy, like just doing things on my own without, and forgetting that I had two other decision makers, three that time.
And a little bit of guilt as I talk about that right now, but it worked out. All right. So I guess it's okay. So basically I went home with this product and, I didn't even read the manual. I just put this thing in , to me, it was very simple. I grew up with tools in my hand and my tools in my hands.
And so I basically just. Put that? indoor unit in my home, ran all the lines to the outside outdoor unit and fired it up and I just couldn't believe it, how quiet it was. It was like August ish this time. And the house was cool. It was a different kind of air conditioning. Like you walk into a home with a window rattler, it's either way too cold or It's loud and, or you're turning it on and off and, but this thing was silent, it was super comfortable. Cool. And it didn't fit in my head. Like, how are they doing this?
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:12] Matt: And then I started having a notion of wait a minute, these do work. But there is a lack of education on them and there's no passion behind it. And there's nobody, it's almost like a secret that no one knew about in Maine. But back then, these units were only rated, I think, down to I think 17 degrees outdoor ambient temperature.
So then I went into winter.
I still haven't told anyone about this. My wife was like, what is that thing on the wall? Like, why do I have to stare at this? And why are you making these decisions without me?
[00:10:41] Ed: Yeah.
[00:10:42] Matt: Again, shows my age at that time. I was 26 years old, 26 or 27, right around there. And then we went into a winter and I heated the whole downstairs with this thing. Back then the R L M Q models they said they would heat, but down to 17, but I ran it the whole winter
[00:10:59] Ed: What manufacturer was that?
[00:11:01] Matt: that was a Fujitsu. That was a Fujitsu. 30 is 30,000 BTU, which I had no idea how to size back then. So I was just like, Oh Yeah. just get a big one,
And then went into the heating season and. It literally, I don't know the percentage. I want to remain very truthful. I don't know what it was, but I saved a lot of oil. I know I knew that I, it was an old home. It wasn't spray foamed yet had rock foundation, like a lot of old main homes
1800s So at this point I go back to my partners. So I was like, Hey, I got to tell you something. I found something and I think it's something we can, that can grow legs for us. And they basically, they're like, where'd you get that? I'm like, remember that budget? Yeah, I snuck that in there. Because I, I think I found something that is going to be huge for us. And they're like, we're already so busy doing all this other stuff. What are you thinking? And I'm like I'm thinking this is going to be, the future.
They, I, love them for this, but they basically laughed at it and, but there's such good people and they were like, okay, let's just call this Matt's pet project and he can work on it as he's running this. Entire service department,
[00:12:11] Ed: Yeah.
[00:12:12] Matt: A technician which would have been Dan's brother, right? He now is a salesperson selling heat pumps. Many years later. And then I had, and I hired somebody to answer the phone that I used to for service. And I was trying to juggle doing service work on appliances.
But while I was there. The sales, the salesman came out and I was just like, start talking to people about this product that I had found that doesn't work, but does,
[00:12:38] Ed: Yeah.
[00:12:39] Matt: and I picked up, I remember the first client, he was like, my mother, she's 90 and she lives in one part of the house that she's always going up and wanting the house to be 80. And it's driving me nuts, where my wife and I are miserable. Will it work in this one room? She had a, like her own little living room. So we put it in that and cranked it up to 80. And that one zone, that one spot was 80. The rest of the house is livable. And it was the right person because he was so happy about it that he ended up small town, remember it was only 4, 000 of us ish. So word spread that, Hey, this thing that Matt's pitching, it does work
[00:13:23] Ed: can I put it, I hate to interrupt a great story, but I want to go back to something, which is,
[00:13:27] Matt: Yeah.
[00:13:28] Ed: I'm going to say it's a one in 10, 000 people who would go to a supply house. Ask about a piece of hardware hear that it doesn't work and say, give it to me.
[00:13:41] Matt: It's divine intervention. I don't,
[00:13:44] Ed: I, was going to ask you what happened there.
[00:13:47] Matt: I don't know.
I, what it's, it sounds cool right now, right? Cause it worked, but it shouldn't have. And it should have been, I like bad, like what kind of risks, like I'm the risk taker at Dave's World and my business partners are so good at letting me just be me. As soon as it started growing legs a little bit we ended up putting one in the CEO's house
[00:14:11] Ed: Are all yeah.
[00:14:14] Matt: it blew his mind and he can't, I remember him being like, okay, I get it. This is so good. What I'm struggling with is why. Why don't we know about this? Back then Maine wasn't really an air conditioned state. But I think people just want to be more comfortable. So Bob, my business partner he's brilliant. And as soon as he saw what I had seen, he knew that he could carry that forward with me. But I couldn't have done it without him. I would have still been one guy in a van with a couple of helpers installing heat pumps. He came to me, was like, okay, this is what you got to do. You've got to go full time sales on this and install them. We'll get the appliance side covered. And try to get one in a week focus on, and then we started advertising it still felt like selling snake oil,
[00:15:07] Ed: I was going to say you guys had, there's a line that like every, to make a truly successful business, you need a secret.
[00:15:13] Matt: yeah,
[00:15:14] Ed: You guys had a secret. You're the only people in Maine who knew heat pumps crush, even in Maine.
[00:15:20] Matt: Even the distributors they don't work. So I saw the biggest uphill battle, but it was so exciting,
[00:15:26] Eric: How did you, so for those first customers, like, how did you sell them this thing that seemed impossible? Like, how did you do that?
[00:15:33] Matt: When you have a product that works, that you're not just trying to sell to make money that you believe in and that you love that resonates, I think with people. So basically what I did was I'd go, I pitched it one day.
I was like, look, if you don't like this thing, I'll give you two winters and two summers. If you don't like it, I'll give you all your money back. I'll put it in
[00:15:53] Ed: Are you serious?
[00:15:54] Matt: what I did. And then it took off like fire. Everyone would just be like, Wow. Like you believe in it that much. And I'm like, absolutely.
And I said, and the reason I give you two, cause we might have a mild winter. We might have a cold one and then, or we might have a summer that isn't super hot or whatever, but I'm going to give you two years. It's got a 12 year, back then it was five and seven warranty. I was like, you got a seven year warranty on the sealed system. You got a two year, all your money back guarantee. Why would you not want to check this out? And then it got exciting when once that happened, I was like, okay, I had heard of one other store, one other place in the United States, and it was in Oregon called the Heat Pump Store. I cold called the owner and all they did was heat pumps.
I wish I could say we were the first United States. We were the second. So I call, I just called them up one day. And I was like, you don't know me. I'm Matt Scott from Maine. And I found the heat pump like you guys did.
And they're like, Oh, it's wonderful. They knew all about it. And I said, do you mind if I just fly out there? Hang out with you for a day. And they're like okay. Maine people are really friendly. So say the, yeah they said, sure, come on over. So I threw some skis and bag together.
Cause while I was out there, I was going to ski out West for the first time ever. I was pretty exciting. I flew out there and I just showed up and they were really surprised. One That I came. And then we just started spitballing ideas and trying to cross pollinate. And their marketing was working and I grabbed a lot of that information.
I went out on installs with them, checked it out, spent like three or four days there, had a blast with them, went out, he had the whole team come together for me. And we all went out to dinner and it was a little nerd fest, talking about these secrets came back with that knowledge. And I was like, , Bob, we need to take this to retail. And we need to pour some money into it and we need to set budgets and follow them with trying to grow this while operating all of that other business, which we did all the way up until 18? We sold the rest of it in 18,
[00:17:50] Eric Fitz: Wow.
[00:17:51] Ed: You ran the appliance store until 18?
[00:17:53] Matt: 2018. Yeah, everything
[00:17:55] Eric: Holy cow.
[00:17:55] Matt: it was chaos.
[00:17:56] Ed: I didn't know that.
[00:17:57] Matt: It was chaos trying to build that whole business while trying to run all those other businesses. A lot of people say, Matt, would you do it again? Half the time I say no. Because of the, between 26 and I'd say 36, it was countless hours. It wasn't 60 and sometimes 80, it was just up really early, working late at night put a lot of hardship on my own family. It's always working, but I had that burning desire that is so hard to explain. And a lot of entrepreneurs I'm hoping that are listening to this is Oh Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Like when you are in love with something and it's going to work no matter what. And back then then, '08 hit. I remember. Doing rock, paper, scissors. Who's going to swipe their credit card to make payroll. It was Dave's World was running on a, it was very difficult. We weren't charging enough.
I started going to classes. Piece of advice was like, I'll never forget this I was in a class in Vegas, actually, I used to go fly out into all these classes and one guy was like, go back and double your labor rate. And I'm like, that's crazy.
I'll lose half of my customers. He goes, wait a minute. So you're going to lose half your customers. Make the same amount of money and free up all that other time to do whatever else you and I'm like, Wow.
[00:19:19] Ed: That's some good quick math.
[00:19:20] Matt: double there and it didn't really phase anybody And then as we went merging into more of the heat pump side of it, I pitched heat pumps like that. I'd go in there and say, look, you're probably going to get three quotes. I'm going to tell you right now that I'm going to be the most expensive. Let me tell you why.
I learned that if you told them that, Then the trust meter goes all the way up. They find out on their own that you're just trying to take more of their money. But if you're like, hey, I'm more expensive and this is why
we use these line sets.
We do this. It takes us three times longer. We do an actual triple evac. do a vacuum pump that has to get down below 200 microns, which means you can't have a leak. And just explain basically my story.
[00:20:08] Eric Fitz: Matt, can you talk about the kind of arc from, it was you selling, sounds like you were also helping with installs to like how you the kind of growth from you to having an install team.
[00:20:22] Matt: Yeah. I the first thing Bob, so Bob, I'm going to keep saying his name over and over again. Cause he's my, He's everyone needs a leader, right? He's my leader. I trust him. And he'd, and yeah, he's awesome. And he'd be like, Matt, look, you can't do this yourself. And I was I didn't want anyone doing the work. I spent way too long doing I spent the whole day doing a single zone. Like everything had to be perfect. Too many zip ties. Just everything had to be like, just perfect.
So I took my appliance apprentice. He was 17 when I hired him. He's still with us. He's 36 or 37 now, but he was 17 when I brought him into the heat pump world and said, I need you to learn how to install this with me. And he basically is, he almost felt like my kid, he was just. He needed a home and he found it with me and I taught him everything. And then now I could go sell something, bring him to the job site and say, all right, get going on this. And I had all, I knew every electrician and sub workout back then.
I didn't have my own electricians, which was a nightmare to try to coordinate that.
And then as soon as I got him rolling, Bob would come to me and say, okay, we're doing one a week. Now I want one a day. What one install a day. And I'm like, you're nuts. And back then I'm like scribbling people's names on a calendar on my wall. Bob's first we're going to get you Gmail and a G Google calendar. So you can, and again, I'm all on my own in this. These guys are running the rest of the business. Okay. just guiding me. And then he was like, if you're going to do that, you need a salesman. He handed me somebody that he knew. Shane McConnell. And he's still here several years later and he wrote around to me, I just said, just absorb. And I still to this day go to installs and I'm like, Yeah. I would do a little different. And then Shane has his own style of selling, which works cause he's, it's unbelievable.
He's not one of the highest close ratios because just an honest, good salesman. So once I got him on board, then we went into a. How do we build a cookie cutter? Okay. And so now that we have, the first step was get our electricians. Check that box. Next get SOPs for everything. This is the standard operating procedure.
This is how we're going to do it the exact same way at every single house. That way I don't, I'm not stressing out while I'm out trying to sell them. And then getting involved with all the home shows. And I I lived and breathed heat pumps still do to this day.
We hired, we knew that none of us went to school for running a business.
So hired a business coach. That's still with us. We hired him in 07 Hal McClamor from Alabama. He lives in Alabama and he would fly in once a month and basically make us stop working in the business and made us work on the business taught Dan how to be the best CFO with all the budgets and all the spreadsheets and basically keeping track of everything, making a dashboard that we all could look at once a week as the owners and make adjustments with all the data that we had been collecting. And then he basically said, okay, if we want more Dave's Worlds, cause that was the vision, right? Okay, let's work from the end in mind when are you going to die? When do you think you're going to die? When do you think you're going to retire? So this is when I want to retire. Okay. How are you going to do that? We got to, we want five stores. How are we going to do that? We got to go to Southern Maine where the population is. That's what we did. We paid someone to tell us what to do and then learn along with that just everything got written down and structured and that's where Dan and Bob and Hal come in because I barely have any structure DNA in me, I am, just out there.
[00:24:01] Ed: But that's what led you to pull a heat pump that wasn't supposed to work in Maine and put in your house, right? Like it takes both kinds of skill sets and personalities to make a business thrive.
[00:24:11] Matt: and as that partnership, I think partnerships work. I think they're better than a lot of people say, I'm better off on my own running this business. With my business partners, I can trust them with my livelihood, just two people, like I trust them what do I do? And they guided me and I listened to them and I worked with them. We decided to never have a fight. We called it appropriately disagreeing, which was taught to us. If, we spent every single one day a week. Every Wednesday from eight in the morning until five o'clock at night, we and all We did is talk. We worked on the business.
[00:24:44] Ed: I didn't know that.
[00:24:45] Matt: Yeah. For years. We still do it.
Yes. Wednesday was my whole day. Thank God zoom now.
[00:24:51] Ed: Yeah.
[00:24:51] Matt: They are, again, my structure and I follow their guidance and then we compare, we always talk about Dave's World being a a race car. Bob's the steering wheel. He's the CEO. Dan's the CFO. So he's definitely the brakes, both brakes. He's going to handbrake really.
[00:25:07] Ed: That's why they call them the CF-No
[00:25:08] Matt: yeah, CF-No. And I'm the gas pedal and I'm the gas pedal. And yeah. so there's there's so many ideas and so many things that I've always wanted to do, but I trust them and this is the one that they guided me through and still continue to guide me through. But that doesn't, that passed when I told you guys earlier that I would never do that again. I half mean it because, cause now it's good. I don't work 80 hours a week. I work in normal one of our biggest things that we worked on at Dave's of World is work life balance. I didn't figure that out and my marriage didn't last. Because I didn't understand that I was so business only.
And, and I didn't, I wasn't well read. I didn't figure that out. So that's part of Dave's World's culture. now. is you have to have a work life balance. We only want to pay you for 40 hours and a lot of them are like, but I need that overtime. Okay. Okay. Let's back engineer that. So if I pay you this and you work 50 hours, you're going to make this, how about we work 40 and you still make that and you go home and become a better person and a better family member.
And then that. way, when you come to us. , it works both ways, right? You have to have a happy person at work, you want to send them home happy too. So their lifestyle was good. That's just part of our vision, and we were, the three of us were like, if we write it down and we agree on it and it becomes a principle and we continue to aim at what we have written down and what we want employees to do. Like our mission statement says we want to focus on two things, our customers and our employees . It says nothing about us is one of the first exercises that helped made us do actually was vision mission values.
[00:26:47] Ed: I love
[00:26:48] Matt: What's your vision? What's your mission? What's your values?
[00:26:51] Ed: had the privilege of doing a ride along with one of your salesmen and we weren't in the car 15 minutes before he told me going to work at Dave's World was literally life changing and he painted a trajectory of where he had been overweight, like depressed and it just, it changed once he went to Dave's Worlds.
That is, I heard that from someone who's been working with you guys for a long time. Had no reason to tell me that
[00:27:18] Matt: best compliment. Yeah, it's the, it's an unbelievable compliment because that is the mission. Yeah. And
[00:27:25] Ed: Matt,
[00:27:26] Matt: that's what I'm proud of, honestly, that he pumps is a widget, right? The job creation and the family that we have built here, it's unbelievable. That is what we always wanted to be known for.
It's wow, what a great place to work. And we, Hal said, you got to get the right people to put golden handcuffs on them and give them the key and give them the key.
[00:27:49] Ed: I know you preach the gospel of heat pumps and you've gotten guys who have successful HVAC businesses, and you've gotten them to abandon the other stuff they were working on and just focus on heat pumps. So I'm curious, if HVAC business and you were going to give me advice or tell me why I should just focus on heat pumps.
What do you tell people?
[00:28:10] Matt: well, a lot of people will say you can't just sell ductless, right? You can't, that's not an, HVAC company. I'm like it'll be whatever I tell it, it's going to be, it's mine. So I think that's where you start is Like, what do you want to focus on? And it, and like at Dave's World, one of the things that we did do is that it's very hard to focus on four stores. So it's almost like having four products at one store. So what we did is we broke them out,
Dave's World Wyndham, its own budgets, its own profit and loss, its own employees, and they don't really communicate with each other. So that's still this very small 16 to 20 people. So what I would advise people to do is drop everything you're doing and just do ductless, right? And it'd be super easy to make more money and be way easier. I can say that, but then there's also this demand for the other parts of HVAC. So what I would say to both crowds, people that would just bite it off and just go off on their own with just ductless. Go for it. Those that can't. That it's not part of their vision. It's not my vision. It's their visions. And that's okay. But part of that vision should be get laser focused on each one of those things separately and stop combining them. Have a ductless department, have a manager in a sales process. That's for that. And then break it apart where you can get very passionate about one side of it.
And then you can have this little fun competition so I think that's what it is.
[00:29:29] Ed: All right, Matt, this has been awesome. Last few questions. If someone wants to know what Dave's World's secret to success was, what would you tell them?
[00:29:37] Matt: Everything written out and then executed every single day. And we came up with a formula. It was focused intensity over time, multiplied by awesomeness equals unstoppable momentum. That was our formula. If I was into tattoos, That's what I would have on my,
[00:29:52] Ed: Yeah.
[00:29:53] Matt: focus intensity over time.
[00:29:55] Eric Fitz: awesome.
[00:29:55] Matt: Multiplied by, we said awesome. But it's passion or burning desire, you multiply it by that. You get unstoppable momentum.
[00:30:04] Ed: Love it. All right. Final question, Eric and I were talking about this. We think we want to end the pod with one tactical recommendation, a book, a seminar, a training person, like something that had an impact on you that like someone else listening could just pick up and engage with and learn something and help build their business. First book, my daughter and her boyfriend and my other daughter are reading right now, and I have a test it's Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It's the most powerful book, I think, out there. Every 18 year old should be forced to read it because it's all about your mind and how to make things happen.
[00:30:43] Matt: And then two others that stick out is Weldon Long. Upside of fear and the power of consistency. You want to talk about a story he spent, he was 40 years old. When he got out of jail, built one of the, he dumped all his eggs in the HVAC basket and it got so successful that he is now a motivational speaker that goes across, he's a friend of mine now, but he wrote two books while he was in jail.
And and all he did with his time is realize how bad he screwed up and he has all this time. And he was like, I'm going to become, I'm gonna get my master's in business.
I'm going to pick a category that everyone needs, heating and cooling. And I'm going to be the rock star of that when I get out.
And he did it like my story is Whoa, how'd that happen? That's an anomaly. No, this is true brainpower. So yeah, the the upside of fear and power of consistency is a must. then find Weldon on Facebook or Instagram and high five them. And he'll talk back to you. He'll be like, he engages he's a normal, cool guy.
[00:31:39] Ed: love it.
[00:31:40] Matt: So if he can do it, that my point, if he can get out of jail, like it would have been four years ago for me. He got out of jail at 40
[00:31:50] Ed: Yeah.
[00:31:51] Matt: and he built a business just like mine, but it was so good that he could sell it, build another one, sell it, and then become a motivational speaker. And now he has three Ferraris in a beautiful Colorado home and a beach house in a Maui,
[00:32:03] Ed: Amazing.
[00:32:04] Matt: mind.
[00:32:05] Ed: a heck of a story. Matt Scott.
Thank you so much for being our first podcast guest.
Yeah.
[00:32:12] Matt: That's cool. Thank you.
[00:32:15] Ed: cool.
[00:32:16] Matt: Thank you so much for inviting me.
[00:32:18] Eric: Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy. And just a reminder that the opinions voice were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe in your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you.
So feel free to reach out. You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy. Thanks a lot.
