·
43 minute read
Most contractors don't lose jobs because they cost more. They lose because customers don't understand why they cost more.
When every company sounds the same, price becomes the only signal left. Homeowners compare numbers, not methods. Good contractors feel forced into discounts they never planned to offer.
This episode is a training Ed Smith, co-founder of Amply Energy, delivered for the Building Performance Association. It's built around one question: how do great contractors win without being the cheapest?
The Matrix: Four Ways to Compete
There are only so many ways to win in the mind of a homeowner. Take price out of it, and you're left with two levers: expertise (your HVAC and building science knowledge, your craftsmanship) and process (the tools and procedures that make a customer's experience frictionless, from the first phone call to the final invoice).
Put those on a 2x2 matrix and you get four competitive strategies.
Low expertise, low process? That's price. It's Stan in a Van. Not a terrible place to start, but a brutal place to stay — overhead is low, but so is the price book.
High process, low expertise? That's speed. That's private equity. Think Sila's subway ads: "Service in hours, not days." Their entire identity is frictionless booking. You can't outrun them here unless you have an IT department to match.
High expertise, low process? That's customization. Every home is a blank canvas. Extraordinary work, but slow and hard to scale. A perfectly good life — just not a scalable business.
High expertise, high process? That's trust. That's the holy land. And that's where this whole training points.
Most contractors are somewhere in the middle — vaguely competing against all four types simultaneously. The goal is to pull toward the upper right.
When Expertise Is Visible, Price Becomes Secondary
Homeowners can't evaluate what they can't see. Load calculations, airflow testing, pressure diagnostics, system design — these matter deeply. But if they live only in your head or your software, they don't protect your price.
The contractors who win show their thinking. They don't just present data — they explain what they found, why it matters, and how it connects to the problem the homeowner is actually living with. When a customer understands why you're recommending what you're recommending, you stop being a bidder and start being a trusted advisor.
Mike Missimer of MGI Mechanical in Denver went from zero trucks to 25–30 in just a few years by doing proper load analysis on every single job. "We're not a box changer. We're gonna look at the house, understand the infiltration, test the duct system, understand capacities, do a proper load analysis." Manual J, Manual S, Manual D — not as boxes to check, but as the thing that separates him in front of homeowners.
Training and Process Are Where Differentiation Actually Lives
Kevin Brenner of Healthy Homes, outside New York City, shut down his entire HVAC department after realizing he couldn't get his existing technicians to do heat pump work the right way. He ate the sunk cost — trucks, equipment, months of training investment — and started over. "We took another year, shut down the HVAC department, retrained some of our employees to do heat pump work the right way, and started it up again about two years ago."
That's an extreme example, but it illustrates something important: differentiation isn't just a positioning decision. It requires real investment in how your team does the work.
Hal Smith of Halco in upstate New York makes a similar point through a different lens — his company's mission. Halco is built around the customer for life, and Hal describes what that means in practice through something as specific as warranty decisions. "When there's a warranty issue that maybe is a little on the gray side, I'm gonna always rule in the customer's favor because we're all about that customer for life. Private equity firms have investors to answer to next week. That gray warranty decision doesn't get made in the customer's favor."
Halco keeps gaining employees from PE-acquired companies because those employees don't like how customers are being treated. A clear mission, lived consistently, attracts both the customers and the employees you actually want.
Know Your Customer — And Build Your Marketing Around That
Two of the most practical items on the Trust Checklist are closely related: knowing your ideal customer, and building a marketing process designed to filter everyone else out before they ever reach your team.
David Dahar of Visionary Heating and Cooling in the Twin Cities is direct about it: "We're really trying to get them to determine that we're not the company they want to work with." He doesn't service systems he didn't install. He only takes certain jobs. He knows exactly who he's looking for — and he doesn't lose sleep over the customers he turns away.
Larry Waters of Electrifying My Home in California built his entire intake process around the same idea — a 20-minute online form, with photo uploads, before anyone gets to speak to a human on his team. "I know anybody that's coming through is serious about getting a project done. And it instantly eliminates one personality profile that's never gonna buy from me — because they don't have the patience to fill out the form."
It's worth noting how different this looks from the private equity playbook — Sila offers 17 ways to book instantly from your phone. Larry's intake is deliberately the opposite. Both are intentional choices. The question is which one fits the business you're trying to build.
Slowing Down the Sales Process
One pattern that comes up repeatedly among the best contractors Ed has interviewed: they go the opposite direction from speed. Rather than rushing to quote, they slow down and focus on educating the homeowner first.
John Semmelhack of the Comfort Squad in Virginia describes it directly: "Being upfront with the homeowner that you want to slow it down, really understand their house, and propose a solution that's custom-tailored — we've gotten that feedback over and over again from clients that they really appreciate that."
This approach doesn't work for emergency replacements. But for planned upgrades, electrification projects, and persistent comfort problems, it tends to land well — and John's conversion rates reflect that.
When a Homeowner Says You're Too Expensive
The training closes with what Ed calls the best response he's heard to the price objection. Paul McCue, head of sales at Rayo Cook in California, lays it out:
"The customer calls back and says, we like what you said, but you're $2,000 more. And it's very easy to respond: did you have the load calculation numbers from the other contractors? What was the airflow measurement? They didn't do it. And there's dead silence. There's always dead silence."
You can also ask them to send over the competitor's load calc, if they have one. Run the numbers against your own. The inputs are almost always wrong — wrong window orientations, default assumptions that don't reflect the actual house. That's how you make the price comparison irrelevant — not by defending your number, but by demonstrating that you're solving a fundamentally different problem.
Key Takeaways
- There are four ways to compete as a contractor: price, speed, customization, and trust. For independent businesses, trust is the only sustainable path to healthy margins.
- Expertise and process are the two levers that get you there. You need both — expertise without process is hard to communicate, and process without expertise is just speed.
- The contractors who grow without competing on price know exactly who their customer is — and actively filter out everyone who isn't.
- When a homeowner says you're more expensive, respond with a question about what the other contractor actually measured.
- Download the Trust Checklist here — pick one item and go after it.
Timestamps:
[00:00] - Introduction & Warm-up
[03:01] - Ed’s Journey with Amply
[07:48] - Competing Beyond Price
[09:06] - Expertise and Process
[16:20] - The Trust Checklist
[17:25] - Case Studies and Best Practices
[26:49] - Ideal Customer and Marketing
[32:11] - Demo Website with Energy Circle
[36:28] - Slowing Down the Sales Process
[43:07] - The Importance of Charging for Expertise
[52:07] - Closing Remarks
Transcript
00:00:00.000 — 00:00:53.920
But competition is getting fiercer and that can mean a race to the bottom and so excluding price. If you do not want to do a race to the bottom, if you do not just want to win on price, there are two other ways you can differentiate in the mind of a homeowner. So take price out of it. There's two other things you can do.
One, you can demonstrate your expertise. You can have the expertise and you can demonstrate it. Right. And so that's your HVC and building science knowledge and craftsmanship. That's fundamentally what it is. And second one is the process. These are the tools and procedures you use to make a customer's journey frictionless, from when they first call you to when they schedule and you show up, and when you put the booties on to when they get the invoice to how you explain it throughout.
Right. First big question how do great contractors not compete on price? How do they win without being the cheapest? This is my answer. Expertise and process. But let's unpack it.
00:00:57.880 — 00:02:08.670
Hey everyone, welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. This week's episode is one I've been wanting to put out for a while. It's a training I did for the Building Performance Association. It's called Stop Competing on Price when on trust. And the core question I'm trying to answer is one that has driven a ton of what we do here at Amply.
The question is, how do great contractors win without being the cheapest? We get into a framework I call the business model matrix. We go through the trust checklist, and we hear from some incredible contractors who are actually living this out in their businesses day to day. If you want the trust checklist for yourself, the link is in the show notes.
Just click it and drop your email. It'll come straight to you and a quick plug. BPA sponsored this webinar that led to this podcast, and they're also sponsoring this podcast. Their National Home Performance Conference is coming up April 13th through 16th in Columbus, Ohio. Eric and I will both be there.
If you're focused on home performance, contracting, building science, or the intersection of HVAC and the building envelope. This is the conference use discount code PC PBP to get the best available pricing. All right, on to the episode.
00:02:12.550 — 00:16:49.880
Welcome, everyone. My name is Editor Smith. I'm the. One of the two co-founders of Amply Energy. This is our training on don't compete on price when on trust. And so here's what I have planned for this. So I talked about the agenda. Feel free to ask questions throughout. I think a conversation is 10,000 times better than a presentation.
So I'll be presenting. But if you have questions like raise a hand, put it in the chat, put it in the Q&A. I'll try to keep an eye on both of those. Katie will too, but we'd love to make this interactive as it can be on a webinar. So with that, let's get into it. Okay, the first thing I wanted to in that agenda was just introducing myself and briefly.
So an important thing to know about us is we started out selling heat pumps, and frankly, we started out doing a bit more than that. We were doing full stack. And this smattering of emojis means home electrification jobs. And so we were doing what you can see here. This is one of our projects we put on these solar panels.
We put in that Mitsubishi hyper heat system. We put in a new panel, an EV charger, a battery. We did a bunch of weatherization and air sealing work. And so we were doing these full stack, high performance home electrification jobs. Humbly, I thought we were incredibly differentiated. I thought there was not much like us out there.
We were doing these awesome forecasts of how your bills would change. How much would you save the ROI on it? Like, it was very fun work. It took me and I was our sort of comfort advisor, electrification engineer. That's kind of the role I was playing. It took me roughly 40 hours to design and sell a job, and a lot of the time in the home, and I have to say, I was mad as hell when I lost a job, like I really was, because I thought we were just so differentiated and there was a bunch of jobs where I did this incredible whole proposal, and the homeowner kind of said, okay, cool, thanks.
We can't afford it. Turned around and they, like, took it to an insulation company and did a $2,000 job instead of the whole thing that we were proposing. And it just it ate me up, really ate me up. To reduce this 40 hours, we started building our own software to make ourselves faster. And the thing that the hardest for us was the heat pump design.
And so that's really where our software today was born. And how Amply turned changed from a contractor to a software company. Our software was born out of our contracting business that was doing jobs like the one you see here. But as it relates to this training, I'll say from my experience designing, selling those full stack, high performance home electrification jobs, I am incredibly obsessed with this one question how do great contractors win without being the cheapest?
Because I did not want to be the cheapest when I was selling to homeowners like. And I thought we were great at what we did in amply one point out. So that's what we're going to talk about today, frankly. Like this one question is just what the next, whatever 50 minutes are going to be spent on. Just a little bit about like where our insights come from and why we have any right to be up here, like taking an hour of y'all's time.
So from selling heat pumps ourselves, I was doing that. I was a comfort advisor and electrification engineer. Like that's what I was doing. I am still the only salesperson at amplify. And so I think my last I clocked it. I've done about 1300 sales calls with 1300 different contractors, and I learned something new on every sales call I do and every contractor I meet.
So a lot of that and we have this podcast, which I forget we're on episode 47, 48, something like that, where we basically interview incredible contractors who have built incredible businesses, and we asked them how they did it. And so everything you're about to see on these next slides comes from this competition is getting fiercer.
I hear that on every sales call that I do. It's just it's tough out there and the wobbly or the economy gets the tougher it gets. So where is the competition? There. Stand in the van. As always been stand in the van and I say stand in the van without making fun of. Stand in the van. The biggest, baddest, best contracting businesses in the country basically all started out to stand in a van, right?
A guy with a dream like that's how they start thinking about sending the van. Is overhead slow? Sometimes he doesn't fully understand his own price book, and so his pricing can be brutal. And if you operate in heat pumps, you don't need master plumbers license. You don't need a sheet metal license like you need your EPA refrigeration license, which takes a day to get.
And so the barriers to entry, particularly in this world of heat pumps, is pretty darn low. So we're competing against Santana van. Private equity roll ups. This is big in HVAC. It's big. And a bunch of weatherization. Like I can't go on LinkedIn without seeing some new update on what's going in private equity.
And these guys compete like they absolutely know how to compete. We're going to get into that more. And there's this third bucket of competitors, which aren't in every state but are in more and more states, which I call these e-commerce heat pump startups. Elephant energy, tetra zero, quit carbon, elephants in Colorado, Massachusetts, California, tetras in New York and Massachusetts zero.
Colorado. Illinois. California. Massachusetts. So if you are in a place where these guys operate and you know they are fierce, and if you're not, you may think like, what's the big deal? We'll talk about what's the big deal? Because when you see what they can do, it's pretty darn impressive. But competition is getting fiercer.
And that can mean race to the bottom. And so excluding price, if you do not want to do a race to the bottom, if you do not just want to win on price, I would suggest there are two other ways you can differentiate in the mind of a homeowner. So take price out of it. There's two other things you can do. One, you can demonstrate your expertise.
You can have the expertise and you can demonstrate it. Right. And so that's your week in building science knowledge and craftsmanship. That's fundamentally what it is. Like the craftsmen you are at the trade you've chosen, whatever that may be. The second one is the process. These are the tools and procedures you use to make a customer's journey frictionless, from when they first call you to when they schedule and you show up, and when you put the booties on to when they get the invoice to how you explain it throughout.
Right. You could have the best expertise in the world and not be able to explain it and break it down for the homeowner and let them feel it and enjoy it. So I would say these are two different areas you can build and invest in so that you don't have to compete on price. This is basically what we're going to dig into for the rest of it, right?
First big question how do great contractors not compete on price? How do they win without being the cheapest? This is my answer. Expertise and process. But let's unpack it. All right. We'll continue to unpack it. All right. If I take expertise on one axis and I take process on the other axis, and this is high, low, low and high, we end up with four quadrants.
And those areas are ways you can win. So if you are low processed, low expertise, you win it on price. It's all you got. Right. We kind of already established that. We don't want to be there. If you move over into the high processed, low expertise zone I think this is speed. You've got an awesome sales process.
You get speed to quote is incredible. But like, you're not necessarily demonstrating your expertise. You're winning on speed here. If you have high expertise, low process I would say you're winning on customization. You're really letting the homeowner feel your expertise, but your process can be a little bit bumpy and may take a while.
And this is a holy land right up until the right is always the Holy Land. What does it look like to have high process, high expertise? Well, that's where you're winning on trust. Let's build out these four words a little bit more precise. Speed customization. Trust. Useful. Let's put some personalities on these.
This is Stan in a van. Right. Chuck in a truck. Whatever you want to call him or her. It's low process, low expertise. And you can win here. You can win here, but it can be rough. Right. And so we all kind of know what that looks like. Now, if Stan in a van starts out actually with high expertise, like if Stan in a van is an a tech who's, like, addicted to building science and goes out and starts on his own, it's not sending a van, it's Stanley Van Gogh, the HVAC or building science artist.
And this is where each home is like a blank canvas. Each home is a place where he's viewing it as this new, pristine territory, and he's going to come up with the perfect solution. But like an artist, you never know how long it's going to take. And it's new every time. So that's Stanley Van Gogh winning on customization.
And that's actually not a bad place to live. Like, I know a lot of people operating that kind of business, you can earn decent money, you can make a good margin. It's just you. Maybe it's you in an apprentice, like it's pretty light. It's not a bad place to be. And I actually think if Tim Stasio, I think he can, operates here and he loves his life right now.
All right. If we go right, if Stan is not sending it anymore, if it's high process, low expertise, I would suggest that's where private equity plays. I'm going to call that PE Peter winning on speed. And they don't hide it. They just come right out and say it. Exactly. So I live outside Boston and the, the t the subway here.
My five year old daughter loves to ride it. And so we do it fairly often. And when I was first building this training, like it pulled in front of me. And here's the seller ad. So if you live in the northeast, you'll know Sheila like they're one of these giant PE roll ups. But holy smokes, what's the one thing they tell you?
Service in hours, not days. Speed. If you want that, take your pick of how you want to do it. You can book online, you can chat, you can call scan this QR code. It can all be automated. You don't just have to talk to a human like it is all built for speed. And I would say that's a rough place to compete. Like unless you have a giant IT department and can roll out the best technology.
Speed is an absolutely brutal place to compete. And it's really locked up by these private equity firms. The personality I would put up here is happy. How the heat pump pro I've occasionally had it be bold Brin the heat pump pro in honor of Brynn Cooksey or Hal Smith who we'll hear more about. But both are big members of BPA.
But that's who I would say is up here. And we're going to spend a ton of time like dissecting this. So I'm not going to, like, give you a big speech on Happy Howl right now. What I will do, though, is do a little bit more on the speed, because I think it's pretty interesting. So also not just is private equity. Is P Peter competing down here?
I would say there's new Silicon Valley startups are competing down here, so I'm going to call them Silicon Valley. Stu also trying to win on speed. And I'll show you what their technology looks like. So this is a company called Elephant Energy. If you want you can go to the website and you can try the exact thing that I'm about to do.
But I have like a this is like 90s, I'll show you what it looks like to interact with them for the first time. So here I am. I'm just clicking on get your free online quotes. Let's get started. It's asking me where home is located. Okay guys, I'm just putting in Brookline, Massachusetts. What is it? Single family multifamily, rough square footage.
What would you say it is? How many floors? How many rooms? What do you mean by rooms? Rooms are the total number of conditioned spaces. So it's not bedrooms. It's like bedrooms plus living room plus kitchen plus basement, if that's the room. Okay, so you put in a number of rooms. Go on to the next one. What's your heating system?
What's your cooling system. Does your home have ducts. Has your air ceiling boom. All right. What's your fuel type? What are you interested in? Let's go on to the next one. What's your approximate household income? How nice would it be to have a homeowner just tell you that up front? Right. Where is your utility next when you're looking to upgrade.
Here. Calculating. Calculating. Calculating. Done. I'm breathless. Boom! The proposed. An air source heat pump. They give me a little bit of information on it. They give me installation. They take off the rebates up front. Cost incentives or tax credits. What's the total cost at the end? Bang bang boom.
I'm not saying we should all do this. In fact, many of you are probably thinking like there's no way. That's right. But what are they doing? It's smooth. It's easy. They're getting a sense for the intent to buy. They're anchoring someone on, like, a decently high ticket. Right. And then they'll move you on to deeper into the process.
But it's it's quick, it's easy. Like this is what speed can look like. And so again, I would say I wouldn't want to compete here. I don't want to compete here. I would much rather take my time and show my craftsmanship. And so let's talk about how you beat something that looks like this. I would suggest that nine out of ten contractors I talked to are in the middle.
They're not in any of these extremes necessarily. They're in the middle, but the middle can be muddy and the middle can feel like it's under attack from all sides. And maybe on one job you're competing with both Sand and Van and Peter, and you don't kind of know which way to go. So I would suggest most of us on this call right now are here.
Although, let's be real, this is a BPA event. So if you are here, you're probably like a little higher than straight in the middle. And I'm going up on the expertise scale. Folks who are here self-selected in y'all kind of have higher expertise to start. But let's talk about really how to bring that to life.
And I think most of the solid independent businesses operate here. That's another way that I think about it. All right. So this is all very theoretical, right? Like charts, matrices. Let's like get tangible. The rest of this is going to be pretty darn tangible. And just a quick warning. This is designed to be thought provoking.
And by that I do mean like a little bit uncomfortable. I'm going to paint for you all what it looks like on a scale of 1 to 10 to be an 11, and I think that's useful. And then you can decide I want to be an I do, I want to be an eight. But let's like think about what it is to be an 11 on some of these dimensions. So what are the dimensions.
We put them in this thing we call the trust checklist. It's broken down into two columns Expertise and Process. And we have ten items under each. I'm not going to read this to you, but we will unpack some of these if I'm going to the next slide. If you're like, wait, I didn't get to see that scan the QR code. If you scan this QR code, it'll take you to the website.
If you just put in your email address, it'll email you a PDF of this checklist. It'll look just like this here. If you can't find it, check spam. It's usually pretty quick. I'm talking a little bit longer than I need to on this slide, just to give everyone time to pull out your phones and scan that QR code. If you don't get it now,
00:16:50.960 — 00:25:58.830
I will show this again at the end. So you get another shot at it. But with that, I'm going to go on to the next 1 in 3, two, one. Don't worry, you'll get another shot at it. All right. What I want to do now is unpack some of my favorites that are on this. So let's start at the very beginning. Let's start with the first one.
I have a deep commitment to ongoing employee training. And I think for an example of on a scale of 1 to 10, what an 11 looks like. Kevin Brenner says it great. He is the co-founder co-owner of Healthy Homes right outside New York City. He is a when it comes to high quality contractors, he is extraordinary. So listen to what he did to get the training for his HVAC and heat pump team, right.
What we learned is that for us to do it right. We had to train our people ourselves because the industry does not train people typically to do it the right way. And so we hired people that came from the traditional HVAC world, and I could not get some people when I wasn't looking to test the system to 600 psi.
Wow. They thought the system was going to explode, even though it says in the manual to test it to 600 psi, I couldn't get them to do a triple evacuation. I couldn't do all the things that I expected. Again, this is not a magic formula here. This is another really, really crazy concept. Read the manual. I tried that for about a year with people who came in from the trades, and then I made the decision, the painful decision, because at this point we had two HVAC vans.
We had tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. I said, nope, I'm not in for this anymore. Then we took another year, shut down the HVAC department, retrain some of our employees to do heat pump work the right way. Wow. And started it up again about two years ago. He put his money where his mouth is, right?
I mean, like letting the existing team go. Having invested a bunch of money in hardware, in trucks, in tools, and invested all the time in training people who were not productive for a while. Right. Like, it takes a while to get someone out there and being productive and earning money for the company. So to me, that's an 11 on the scale of 1 to 10.
And he talked about heat pumps. But for whatever the nature of your business, swap out heat pumps and put in whatever it is that you are primarily selling. And I think that's an exceptional example of what it's like to build a team that can do it right. Let's keep going. That's basically how this is going to go.
I'm going to pick one of these. We'll unpack it a bit and then we'll move on. So let's do a three for one here. I run manual J load calculations on every home. I follow OCC as manual as protocol for equipment selection. I do manual D for ducted systems when needed. What does that look like? Well, this is Mike Messmer.
He runs MGI Mechanical in Denver Boulder area. He went from nothing in 2021 2022 to 2530 trucks now something like that. He's basically taking over like the high end electrification oriented market in the Denver Boulder area. He talks about design, so listen for it. But he's really meaning manual Jay manuals.
He uses other terms for it. He talks about that how that in the home separates him from the competition. So let's hear from Mike himself. We're not a box changer. When we go into a home and we analyze a situation, we're going to look at the house, we're going to understand the infiltration. We're going to test the duct system.
We're going to understand capacities. We're going to do a proper load analysis on it. I think the thing that sets us apart a little bit is just the additional approach we take on the front side to really understand the consumer, the house, what they're trying to do, get them the best rebate potential, educate them on the product that's out there.
He is spending more time in the home. He's spending more time training his comfort advisors or project managers. But it lands incredibly well with homeowners. And so they feel they feel that his company is different and they trust them more, and they go with them more. And it's how he's grown so incredibly quickly from nothing to something.
I mean, he's been in the industry for years, but his company hasn't been around that long. All right. So that's what differentiated expertise through sort of best in class design and quoting looks like. Let's talk about another one. I have a mission that is specific, differentiated and inspiring to both employees and customers.
Okay. personally, like I have at times rolled my eyes around mission being a competitive advantage because I've been a part of some organizations where the mission is like blah, it doesn't let you stand out and the mission isn't lived day in and day out. And I think that's the biggest problem with people who have a mission, but it's not a competitive advantage.
So this is how Smith Hal runs Palco in upstate New York. I think when he was on the podcast 18 months ago, I think he was at 40 million. He's north of that now, but I don't know the exact number. He has built a large, successful multi-decade business that is incredibly well respected in his rural area, and his mission is that he's all about that customer for life.
You'll hear him say that Palco is all about that customer for life. But what I love about this clip, and I want you to listen for Hal, does an awesome job of describing how that leads to different decision making in how that separates his company from like these private equity owned HVAC and weatherization companies that are operating in his area.
Okay, so listen for how his team makes very different decisions. And that's differentiated in his market. All right. I'll leave it to Hal now. And frankly, is some of our larger competitors sell to these private equity firms? That's one thing that I stand on when there's a warranty issue that maybe is a little on the gray side, I'm going to always rule them in the customer's favor because we're all about that customer for life.
So I'm not going to worry about that $100 service call today and try to beat the customer up on it, because I'm going to be working for them for the next 30 years or whatever. Those are private equity firms because they've got investors to answer to next week, next month. That gray warranty decision doesn't get made in the customer's favor.
And now what we're seeing is the employees of those companies that used to be able to say to the customer. Don't worry about it, you're covered, are now saying, I'm sorry you're not covered. And they become disgruntled employees. We have gained so many employees from these companies that have sold out to private equity firms, because their employees just don't like how the customers are being treated.
So his team is making different decisions about warranty, about Gray Air, about whatever it might be. And they're taking the long view because they want to work with that customer forever. And that's not necessarily how other companies operate. Right and right. Private equity owned companies are a great example.
They're really about like this month, this quarter's returns. And that is letting him not only win customers but win great employees as they come over to want to join Valco. And so that mission is like a beacon to certain customers and certain employees and the customers employees that he wants. And so it's letting them to letting them win.
So I thought that was just a great example of that. All right. Let's move on to the next one. So looking at this checklist again last one under expertise I take detailed measurements before and after aka test and test out with stuff like blower door test, static pressure etc.. And we're going to get a twofer here.
I priced significantly above market and just can justify it. So this one comes from Bryn Cooksey. He runs Air Doctors in Michigan. He runs HVAC, which is an awesome training. And I'd say if you want to, excellent training, if you can do a Bryn Cooksey training, you absolutely should. He is just magic in a training scenario, but he talks about his team's testing and test out process and how that lets them price above market and frankly, be a different product, a whole different kind of product.
All right. I'll let Bryn speak for himself. Absolutely. We're no bones about it. We're probably. If not, the high is pretty close to it, but it's not the same service. Like we're not swapping a box. We're providing solutions. We test in a test site on every project. And as a result, to hit those numbers, we have to have the diagnostic testing.
So we're not the cheapest, but we say we're the best because of the solutions we provide. The customer can't unsee it. Even if yes, Fletcher, people understand you can't manage what you can't measure. The measurement piece is enormous. Even if people don't understand the exact units of whatever metric you're showing them.
00:26:00.270 — 00:51:22.290
Showing the before and after can be absolutely enormous. And I know a bunch of people who are like testing before, but they're not necessarily testing out. And that before and after is what's particularly powerful. And I know Brin's sales team and they really position themselves as just like just unlike anything else in the market.
They just and they believe it. They have the confidence around it. And so if a customer wants to price shop them with someone else, like, honestly, you just can't. I'm sorry. We're just a completely different product and service. And that's the sort of differentiation you want that confidence of, like, we're just different.
All right, let's jump over from expertise. Let's jump over into process. I have a clear sense of who is my ideal customer and who is not my ideal customer. This one. Let's just first of all, say what it's like to know your ideal customer versus not. I will say I was guilty of when I was in the home selling these jobs.
I thought every customer was my customer. Honestly, I was like any job I lost, I absolutely beat myself up over. And what I've found very interesting for some of the best contractors and customers amply personally has, is they have a really clear sense of who is and who isn't and if they lose a job. But they knew that customer wasn't quite theirs.
They don't lose sleep over it. There's like, it wasn't my customer, I can tell. So this is David Dyer. He's the founder and owner of Visionary Heating and Cooling in the Twin Cities area up in Minnesota. This is his I believe it's his third HVAC company, but it might be his second. But he really kind of wants to do things differently on this one.
And so listen to him explain what he's trying to do and what that means for who he is and isn't his customer. We're really trying to get them to determine that we're not the company that they want to work with. This new company is going to be a heat pump focused installation company. We're not going to be for everybody.
We're not going to be for every home. If the people are obviously not willing to invest the time and obviously the money to make the improvements to their home, then it's just not really going to be a good fit for us. Everybody else does that again. You can follow out your door and land on three guys that do that, but that's just not what we're doing.
David doesn't do service. He doesn't service. He doesn't work on anything that he didn't install himself. Like he really knows what he's doing. And there's only certain products that he does. There's only certain jobs that he takes. And he wants to weed out the customers who don't fit that. Frankly, he doesn't want to waste time.
I hate to say it that way, but he doesn't want to waste time on folks who just aren't a good fit for him. And he knows exactly who he is looking for, and his business is growing nicely. There's plenty of that sort of customer out there. It's not everybody, but there's plenty of them. And so that leads us to the next piece, which is my marketing is designed to weed out the wrong customers.
It's the copy on your website. It's your intake forms. So let's take a look at what that looks like. This is Larry Waters. He's the founder and owner of Electrify My Home in California, and he has set up a marketing machine that is truly designed to weed customers out before they ever get to talk to anyone who's on salary at his company.
So let's hear Larry talk about his marketing system. One of the things when I built this business is I wanted to build it on a foundation of all the stuff I hated about my previous years in the business. Like I didn't want to repeat any of that. And one of the things I hated as a salesperson was windshield time.
And I knew my demographic and the people we were going to buy from us are very computer savvy. So when I originally built my website like six months before I started the business, and I got the logo and the name and everything weighed before I retired from the other company, I had my website building company build a actual, we call it the online assessment form.
Pretty easy, but it asked a whole bunch of questions about the house that are designed to elicit a little thinking on the customer side about these different systems that are in their house. And there's a couple of questions that are in there to figure out who the customers are. A little bit, but the biggest thing is the customers have skin in the game at that point.
It takes them about 20 minutes. You have to upload some pictures. And so I know anybody that's any of these that are coming through are serious about getting a project done by electrify at home. That's a hot lead. It's a really hot lead. They've got skin in the game. And one of the things I mentioned it before, I'm really into the personality profiling thing.
And it really eliminates one of the personality profiles. That's never going to buy from me because they don't have the patience to fill out the form. so I instantly don't have to deal with those people, which is another thing. And I don't mean to say it like that, but just not our customer, not our preferred customer.
It makes it so much easier for a 20 minute form to get to his team. I mean, that is a massive amount of friction to put into your marketing process, and it's like the opposite of that image I showed of CeeLo, where it's like, here's 17 ways you can book super easily from your phone. It's very different. But he knows who his customer is.
And with that confidence and with that certainty, he can build a marketing process that is great for them and bad for everybody else. And that just lets him build a highly efficient and focused business, which is what he talks about. Basically, for the entire episode he did with us, I find this one, these two right.
Know your ideal customer and build a marketing process Around it to be like maybe the spiciest of all of the items on the trust checklist. And so I also find people just don't know where to start. And worse than that, I find that if I go to because I know a bunch of contractors to this point, if I go to an amazing contractor's website and a not so amazing contractor's website, I'm gonna level with you.
Most of the time I can't tell the difference. The copy is the same, the look in the field is the same. Like it's all kind of the same. So we did something kind of fun so amply and energy Circle, who is our marketing agency? They're based in Portland, but they just focus on marketing for high performance contractors.
We built a demo website, and so we offer that up as some marketing inspiration. And I happen to think it's a killer demo website. Like we spent a bunch of time on this working together. And so we have two goals for this demonstration website. Goal number one stand out from the competition with building science.
But goal number two is say it so that homeowners can understand it. Which like this is tension, right? Like you can't just have a whole bunch of building science jargon because almost every homeowner is not going to get it. It's going to go right over the head. They're going to move on. And so how can we stand out from the competition with building science, but also say it's a homeowners can understand it.
And so this is the demonstration website if you want to check it out it's a full website. It's got About Us sections. Got a blog. It's got case studies. Again, River city is not a real company. We just kind of made it up. It's just there to be like thought provoking. It's got problems. We solve our services, our process.
You can click get in touch. You can see what an intake form looks like. But we also just put out copy that we think is really powerful. So the primary copy on the page is we listen we measure, we fix, we prove it's test and test out. It's building science. But it's just in a way that is short and easy to understand.
And frankly, I think reassuring for a homeowner. Again, scan this if you want. I'll have this on a few different pages. All you have to do is enter, I think, first name and email to access it, but you can see all the pages you can click around. It's a whole functioning website right underneath that on the page.
Oh, that's a good one Richard. Add that we answer the phone. Yeah, yeah. That is not guaranteed anymore these days. All right. It's a demonstration website because I'm the CEO and founder of River city. But what we did here was we just make it, like, hitch in the face, right? If you're a homeowner, is River city a good fit for your home?
If you're looking for the lowest price in a quick swap, we may not be the best match. We take a different approach, one that focuses on understanding the home, fixing root causes, and verifying the results. It goes on, but it's basically, look, we're not going to be the cheapest. That's what you're looking for.
Go someplace else. And I love when one of my customers has a video of the owner kind of explaining the business. I find most of them don't effectively enough say, this is what makes us truly different and unique. So I tried to take a run at that in this video here. I'm not. You're already listening to me too much.
I'm not going to make you look at that, but it's worth checking out. And I want to just show you one more piece of this website. This, I think, is the fire iest right on that home page. There is a us versus them comparison river city versus the competition, our approach and what other guys do. I'll say in my world of like software, this is like pretty common.
I don't see this very much in the HVAC and contracting world. But if you are a high performance contractor, if that is your calling card, like, shout it from the rooftops and compare the rest of the industry to it. So what do we do? We measure first. What do they do? They jump to conclusions. What do we do? We have proven testing methods.
What does everyone else have? Assumptions and rules of thumb. What do we practice? Whole system thinking. We analyze your equipment, your ductwork, your airflow and how your home holds temperature because the whole darn thing works as a system. What does your typical HVAC company do? Equipment only.
They look at your furnace and AC and stop there. You need a new one. It's going to cost you $25,000. We fix what actually matters. They replace equipment first and ask questions later when we walk out the door. We have tested, we have fixed it, and we have verified. The root problem is solved. Often they install and hope.
Put it in. It's cold air or hot air blown out. Put them out. Oh, call me if you have any issues. I'm not saying you should do this exactly, but it's basically a whole darn website of what is an 11 look like on a scale of 1 to 10. If you want to differentiate based on expertise and process, we're not saying you should definitely do this.
A useful thought exercise. So if you want scan that, check out the whole darn website. We built it with Energy Circle. They're awesome. Can't recommend them highly enough. All right. We're closing out here. One of the things I find most interesting is how often the best contractors go the opposite way from speed, as opposed to leaning into speed like PB Peter, they slow down their sales process with a focus on educating rather than rushing to close.
So one of the best articulations of that I've found is from our good friend John Tomahawk, who runs the comfort squad down in the Richmond Charlottesville area in Virginia. He talks about how they slow down the process and how that lands with homeowners. We've really found that this kind of process really sets us apart, like being upfront with the homeowner, that you want to slow it down.
You want to really understand their house and propose a solution that's really custom tailored to their house. And that what you're doing. Yeah, that really we've gotten that feedback over and over again from existing home clients that they really appreciate that. Now, obviously this doesn't work for emergency replacement scenarios, but one of the things that John also talks about in this episode is how like, he's really trying to cultivate people to think before replacement, to think about it ahead of time.
It's kind of built into his marketing and his process and that can feel different. It can just feel the exact opposite of that high pressure close. And especially if you have an education focus and you have the expertise to back it up and you you bring a homeowner along in a way they can understand. It's super powerful for what it can do with conversion rates.
And John's conversion rates are awesome. All right. The core question I wanted to tee up was how do great contractors win without being the cheapest? And I'll say winning is about standing out from the competition. Basically everything on that trust checklist is how you can do things a little bit differently, whether in terms of your expertise or your process, to just stand out and be different.
And that will land you in the trust quadrant. And when you are operating here, I would say price is the furthest thing from the homeowner's mind, and it's not the furthest thing. Right. But price matters at some point. But they know you will fix their core problem and that is what they want first, second and third.
Right. And so you can. You're not going to be beat up over a thousand bucks a year or 2000 bucks there. I'm going to keep going. But Richard's got a comment in here. Perhaps speed is about responding to lead, getting in front of customer. The rest is about the great stuff you described about customer experience after speed.
I would agree, Richard, but I'll say it depends and it depends on the business you want to build. Because Larry and electrify my home and his 20 minute form like, wow, that's a big chunk of time before they can get anywhere. It's all on the website. So like it's instant. They don't have to wait for a human, but you can't really talk to a human electrified at home until you go through that process.
So it's up to you. And that's actually this is a really valuable point, which is again, I've painted what an 11 looks like on a scale of 1 to 10. I offer it as a menu so you all can think about your particular business, your area, the competitors you face, what gets you excited And you can pick and choose from this stuff.
And on some of these things you may dial it down to a five. All of this is is relative and all of it is incredibly personal. So take all this with a grain of salt, but also take it the way I meant it was to be thought provoking, right? To give you some things to think about and maybe make you want to tweak some things here or there.
David Saunders asked a question here about what do you have to say about climate change? I will say, what do you want to say about climate change? And who is your ideal customer profile? If you are going after customers who care a lot about climate change, say a lot about climate change. If you care a ton about climate change, but you operate in an area where like it's not as much on top of people's mind, I would say maybe like focus on something different.
You can still recommend solutions that are very climate forward, but it's up to you and it's up to you about matching what you're passionate about, what's going to let you build the business you love, and what's going to resonate with your ideal customer profile. Everyone you saw. I just showed here like Barry's quite differently.
Bryn Cooksey doesn't talk much about climate. Electrify my home talks a ton about climate, so there's various ways you can do it. A Cameron's got a good question here. The amount of inside this webinar is incredible. Thank you. I'm torn because I want all contractors to follow these principles to protect homeowners in my market, but they are also my competition.
What's my perspective on this? My perspective on that. Cam, good to see you by the way. Always like to hear from you. My perspective on that is it's the rare contractor who's going to put into place half of these. And so honestly I wouldn't I don't think that's going to compromise your business in a substantial way.
And the more of these you do, the more you differentiate. And it's almost like exponential, you know, you know each one you do, you actually separate more than one step away from the competition because it's so rare. And when you put them all together in a way that just as cohesive and authentic, you can build a killer business like Hal Smith.
Hal's got a bunch of competition that does a bunch of stuff similar, but he's done so much of it in such a unique way that he just crushes. And if you end up in a spot where you got a handful of competitors who are pushing you, awesome. Who wants to not be pushed like I find competition? I played sports growing up.
I find it super exciting. Not if I'm drowning in it and losing, but if it's pushing me to be better. I find it quite exciting. So I say go for it. Yes, Richard, qualifying your customer. Yours is individual to all of us here. Everyone has their own unique answer for an ideal customer profile. I couldn't agree with that more.
Terri Johnson has a comment here. Something that I've experienced is that many Colorado companies don't tell the truth. They stretch it and squeeze it. And I have found that being completely transparent, listening and being informative with actual proof of what you're saying will win you a job at 10-K over a company that lies.
Terry. Great point. And that's where like testing test out and showing actual data really matters. And the more fact based you are, data driven, you are grounded in real measurements. I think that's 100% true. Awesome. So just to recap, y'all, everything we talked about for the last 35, 40 minutes was basically unpacking this matrix.
Everything I offered was, how do you kind of inch higher in the upper REITs up into the REITs? Is what that all is is about. And the farther you get up here, the less crowded it is, the less people you're bumping elbows with. And I think the more you are winning with healthy margins and serving customers that make you excited to get out of bed every morning, I want to do one more.
I priced significantly above market and can justify it. A lot of times I talk to contractors and there are questions like, how do I actually tackle a homeowner's concern when they come to me and they're like, we like you, but you're a little bit more expensive than the guy to be like, next, what do I do? And so this is Paul McHugh.
He's the head of sales at Ray Cook in California. He has built a very good business. His episode, if you're interested, is the single best articulation of a soup to nuts sales process I have ever heard. So check out his episode with us. But he has the best response. I mean, there's many, many good, but he has a very good response.
When a homeowner comes knocking and says, you're a little too expensive. So here's what Ray has to say about that. Once you leave that house and the customer calls you back and says, we like what you said, we get it. We all get it. We like what you said. You really seem to know what you're talking about. But you always know what's coming.
The butt and the butt is your $1,000. Or I'm just throwing out numbers, or you're $2,000. And it's very easy to respond with a resonating response, to respond with, did you have the load calculation numbers from the other contractors. And what was the airflow measurement? I'm curious on what they came up with.
They didn't do it. And there's dead silence. There's always dead silence. It's always dead silence. Yeah. So like that can be your answer. You can also say, oh, they did do a load calc. Would you send it to me? Because I'd love to take a look at it. And we make load calc software. I'll say there's a lot of load calc theater out there, people doing load calculations, but like all the inputs are wrong.
Like the someone did cool calc and the windows are all facing the wrong way. It's just the default assumptions about how much window area is on the south facing wall. Well, that's south facing wall is going to have a huge impact on loads in the summer. Like if you actually get a competitor's load calc and you do accurate load calculations, I'm almost guarantee you blow a huge hole in it.
And it basically does the same thing that Ray does here. That's assuming the homeowner said, oh, I have a load calc from the competitor. Well, I bet you can still blow that out of the water. So I just love that response from Ray. All right. As promised, if you didn't get a chance to download this checklist before, here's that QR code.
If I could leave you with anything, I would say set aside a day a week to work on your business, not in the business. It's such a common expression, but best advice I ever got was from the Dave's World co-owners. They built a huge heat pump business in Maine who they took me and Eric, my co-founder side. And like you have got to pick one day every week and do nothing but work on the business, keep it sacred, never miss it.
And it was the best advice we ever got. And we got that advice probably two, two and a half years ago. And it was gold. So do that down in the trust checklist and pick one thing. There's too many things on this list and you can only ever do one thing at a time. So pick one. Whichever one you feel like would have the least investment and highest return, pick that one and go after it.
I was just looking at the chat. We got some great stuff in here, mostly comments, which I think are all great comments that folks can check out, I think. Well, there's a plug here for Cameron Ferguson's podcast, which is also a great one and definitely worth checking out. Richard, thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the webinar.
Katie's link is in there. Elliot asked a question. I would like to know how much y'all are charging in your area for load calc. Do you do want to show them without giving it to them in your bid, or you charging for it and saying you'll credit that money to the swap if they go with you? Elliott, that's a great question.
And if anyone else wants to answer that, feel free. I'll just say that I operate in a market that's really bizarre. And so I hope this works for everyone else. But I do charge for 95 to show up to someone's house to measure all the things, and then I often will have people decline that for a while and then circle back around and end up paying for that.
But unless it's a super simple, relatively close. Somebody that just wants to add a single mini split zone and it's not primary heat for the whole house. I do lean into that explanation of like, this is what sets me apart. I don't do free estimates and charge for that. Take it off the final invoice when we finish a project.
And just today I had a customer who initially declined the evaluation fee, and then I got a text from him saying, when can we get you out to look at this? And so I explained further, I looked at your plans. I can see that your architects, or at least planning for ductwork, that's great that they left us the space, but it adds more work to my plate.
So it's actually going to cost you dollars for me to show up. And because we'll do the whole manual D, we'll propose a real solution. And he paid that invoice immediately. And I'm headed there this afternoon. So yes, I do charge for it. I think more people that start doing that in other markets makes it easier for the rest of us to do the same thing.
And it's worked well for me. That's a great answer. Fletcher. Dave David Richardson over at National Comfort Institute has a great line, which is y'all are craftsmen. Craftsmen don't do their craft for free. And the craft isn't just the install. The craft is also the home diagnosis and the design. And I like that point at the end that the more folks who do this, the more it will become commonplace and not surprising.
Also say I love the stories of the Boomerang customer, right? Where you told them something. They said no, they went with the cheaper option and then let X number of months or years go by. They come back to you when they're like, oh God, I should have gone with you in the beginning. Like that's a pretty common thing.
So I heard all of that in your answer. Fletcher. That was a great one. And sorry for calling you Elliott to start. Elliott, you got your hand raised, too, and you didn't ask a question to kick this off. I'm going to let you in here. Thank you. Fletcher. Okay. Yeah, thanks. That pretty much answered my question.
It was harder to type, but yeah, it was just in these markets where there's all heat pumps everywhere in Florida. So it's not a matter of convincing or changing systems. And a lot of times people are just swap, swap swapping. Nobody wants to fix anything. Everybody wants to sell something new. So yeah, that's where my question came from.
To set yourself apart, charging the locals to let the people know, hey, this system has been changed since you've had this original house in ductwork. We've see that it's off. Here's my low calc. You should only really have this system rather than this in your house. And then again, way to quantify that.
And an easy route to I guess pallets is like, hey, it's going to cost you this much to figure out what system you need. Whereas then I don't know, I guess I'm rambling, but it's like hard in Florida. A lot of people just don't want any upfront extra costs because it's like, well, you see what there is, I just need it's work fine.
I just need a new one. So that's kind of where I went with that. Sorry. That's great. And Elliot, good to chat. Two days in a row. Or maybe there's a day. Yeah it was the other. Yeah. The third we we talked on. So a couple of days. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Good to hear from you again. I would say there's another comment in here building off what you just said, Eliot, someone said, like, there's so much load calc or so much inaccuracy sort of out there.
I heard this amazing line the other day. I was on a webinar and the guy running it, someone was asking a question about they feel bad charging for what they do. The guy running the webinar was like, if you had a jar full of pills that with one pill would cure cancer. Would you feel any hesitation to like, go knock on 50 people's doors and say, I've got pills that cure cancer?
No, you wouldn't hesitate and would you hesitate to charge for those like, no, you wouldn't hesitate to do that either. Like so much of what I'm saying in this chat and so much of what I'm saying from these comments, like, y'all are doing excellent work. We should not feel sheepish about charging for it or charging for the upfront design either, or letting customers know that like what you do is different.
I'm not saying go around and shoot arrows into all your competitors backs, but like Differentiated, high quality work is sadly rare. Sounds like you all are doing it. You should tell the story that you do that. And that's basically what this whole darn webinar was about. Wow. Terry charges. Oh, I think you got an extra nine in there.
It's not, it's not
00:51:23.570 — 00:51:24.249
I think it's
00:51:26.090 — 00:54:26.980
to standard blower door energy rebate though. Awesome. Oh here we go. There was the for was wrong. Okay, so you charged basically a hundred. That's great. Fletcher, I do appreciate the plug for amply, as always. Awesome. This is great. Fletcher did ask Edward how much you charge for blower door. Terry answered and gave that number.
Terry, love to hear it. If you want, you can scan this code. I think it takes you straight to the book of demo page. I can't remember maybe watch a demo, but if you just head to. If you head to amply, you can either watch a demo or if you hit prefer to talk to sales, That's me. Sales. It'll take you to my calendar.
You'll see my ugly mug. And you can just book time. Awesome. There's one comment in from Terry. There was some conversation earlier about collaborating. If you want to clear that, just don't want to leave it in the Q&A. Do any of the companies, instead of competing with others? Resourcing and collaborating works well.
There's so much work by fight. Terry, I love that comment. It also builds off Fletcher's earlier comment up in there about finding those competitors in your area that operate on a higher level and operate to collaborate as a local A team. Share nitrogen when someone runs out. Discuss favorite tools and techniques.
I think that's great. Like build this cadre of of high performance contractors. I'll say I had that when we were doing contracting. We also now I'm lucky to have that in the sort of like HVAC software world. We've got a crew of CEOs running similar ish companies like Furman, who's running Work Hero, big plug for those guys.
Brant, who runs the Heat Pump Summit. It's so good to have a basically a mixed group. It's like an active mixed group. Awesome. Although BPA has mixed groups. Katie. Yeah, we're getting ready to kick out peer groups, and we hope to make an announcement about the structure of that at the national conference.
So we're working on that right now. There was like a small smile. Yeah, when I said that. So I was like, oh, cool. Maybe I don't know about that. Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of contractors that are going to be at this event who are truly opening their books. How Smith is company and his folks are going to be there.
They're going to talk service models, margins, pricing, recruiting, training. And Keith O'Hara. Many of you may know Keith. He'll be talking. We have a whole session on peer groups. How sand went up in your area, but also BPA standing up one for non competing, how to connect with people in non competing areas so that you can be the high quality performing contractor in your market and dominate.
Love it. Just a couple just to clear it. Edward gave his amount that he charged. He charged dollars for a blower door. That's awesome. Fletcher recommended getting leads from the local power co-op. All great tips. All right y'all. I think that's awesome. Delighted to have you on here. Feel free to go to my website, book a demo with me.
Connect on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever else. Under. It's probably the best. All that you can find. Me too. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate many of you staying late and have a great Thursday. Have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. Thank you Katie. Yeah. Thanks everyone. See you. Bye y'all.
00:54:30.220 — 00:54:56.700
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 and 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.
.png)
