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21 minute read
Ilija Crnobrnja was an exchange student in Massachusetts waiting tables, learning English, and studying agricultural economics. When he met and married his wife, he realized he needed a new job, so he found himself in the HVAC business. He worked his way through almost every role in HVAC.
Along the way, his love for building science, customer service, and high efficiency homes was ignited. As you'll hear, Ilija's passion is deep. That passion made him destined to be an entrepreneur. He had to create and build a business to deliver on his vision.
So he and his partner David refinanced their homes and founded SumZero. In their first 6 months, they made $350. That's it. Today, they are a $9M heat pump installer with incredibly happy customers all over Massachusetts.
Join us for Ilija's insights into:
- How building science teaches us to look at the home as a system...
- ... and why HVAC is the engine of that system
- Why heat pumps are the future, and if you build a heat pump business today, you'll enjoy it for decades to come
- His impressive approach to training his team
- Why employee compensation in the HVAC industry needs to be redesigned
- Why you should structure your entire business to focus on delivering a Comfort Consultant's promise to homeowners...
- ... and more
Show notes
- SumZero Energy Systems
- Ilija's LinkedIn
- Corbett Lunsford and the Building Performance Workshop
- Joe Lstiburek and the BuildingScience.com Corporation
- Matt Risinger and his build channel on YouTube
Transcript
The Heat Pump Podcast: Ilija Crnobrnja
[00:00:00] Ilija Crnobrnja: Proposal is a love letter. It's a promise letter, and It's a stamp of intellectual property. All other departments really stem off of that to deliver that promise. Your job is to deliver Comfort Consultants promise, verbal promise, not what's written in a fine print to the homeowner and everybody needs to fight hard.
[00:00:31] Ed Smith: Welcome to the heat pump podcast. Our goal is to make sure the transition to heat pumps goes well for everyone, homeowners, contractors, and the planet. We cover all topics related to heat pumps. The science, the technology, the business, and the policy. Today we interviewed Ilija Crnobrnja, co-founder of SumZero, a heat pump focus installer in Massachusetts. Ilija shares his remarkable journey from an exchange student who barely spoke English, to being co-founder of a $9 million heat pump company today. As you'll see, Ilija is passionate about his business.
He explains how the core concepts of building science and a love for serving customers combined to drive him to refinance his home, take on massive risk and co-found SumZero with his partner, David. He also digs into some fun topics, like why heat pumps are the future, his impressive approach to training his team, how employee compensation needs to be reworked in HVAC industry. And what it means for a proposal to be a love letter between an HVAC company and a customer. Enjoy the show.
[00:01:31] Ed Smith: Welcome to the Heat Pump Podcast,I'm Ed Smith. And my guest today is Ilija. Ilija, do me a favor, you pronounce your last name for me.
[00:01:38] Ilija Crnobrnja: I thought you're gonna attempt to do it
[00:01:41] Ed Smith: Give it a shot,
[00:01:42] Ilija Crnobrnja: No, don't do it don'tIt's pronounced Crnobrnja
[00:01:46] Ed Smith: Thank you.
[00:01:46] Ilija Crnobrnja: It's a last name from the mountains of Croatia.
[00:01:49] Ed Smith: Beautiful country.
[00:01:51] Ilija Crnobrnja: Yes.
Actually Serbian. so it's, it was a small Serbian enclave that lived in Croatia. So my family came from there. I was born in Germany, by the way.
[00:02:00] Ed Smith: I knew you were a citizen of the world.
[00:02:02] Ilija Crnobrnja: Yeah, I am.
[00:02:03] Ed Smith: Welcome. Thank you for being here. I want to get into your backstory but, before we do that, tell us a little bit about SumZero.
[00:02:12] Ilija Crnobrnja: We're currently at 9 million in revenue. About 380 jobs that we did last year, primarily heat pumps. I would say 90 percent of these jobs were heat pumps. are designed and built and maintain model. In this way, we're unique. Mostly whole home applications, mostly new installations. So we will come and really rethink the entire home design and, work sometimes with existing stuff, but mostly taking those boiler homes. then, installing fully ducted, ductless or mixed applications for the homes.
[00:02:46] Ilija Crnobrnja: So, we did this with 30 employees,about, 6 trucks, 3 installation trucks with 3, members, installing it per truck. And then we have a 3rd service truck, those are, that team is there just for maintenance and supporting our customers.
I'm proud of the fact that we have a quickest turnaround. In helping our clients when issues arise,
[00:03:10] Ed Smith: So I would like to get into the story of SumZero, and,It wasn't necessarily a straight shot to where SumZero is today, but no entrepreneurial journey is.
So we'd love to hear about the, how you got to where you are today.
[00:03:24] Ilija Crnobrnja: yeah. I met David, my business partner, at the previous, job. we started SumZero together. we were brothers from the same church.
I came as an exchange student. I was going to Cambridge, I was economist in agriculture. There I was waiting tables, to get myself through the school.
While I was in a restaurant, I actually married my wife and started having children. I said, I have to rethink this career. And then I wound up in the HVAC, On and off since 2011. So I've done really any kind of job besides actually being a technician or installer. I was, you leading a service department and being CSR and, lead coordinator and then, in charge of finances and payroll And those experiences served me later on, which I didn't know any of that. Uh, I was pretty much just trying to survive in the country that's strange to me, learning language. And, I was, exposed to all this.
That was new to me. but, being faithful and to God who put me, in a relationship with David later on. And the moment I met him, I was like, Oh, this kid is a potential.
Cause he was hired to be a salesperson and he excelled within six, seven months.he was the best and we would start working together. I was actually backing him. I was a lead coordinator. I was setting up leads and he was on the field. And We were just crushing, it was fantastic to watch.
One thing that struck me the first time I met you, your passion for what you do. For HVAC, like you're so into the tech and the design and doing right by the homeowner. it's interesting you just landed in it, like where did that deep passion for it come from?
[00:05:00] Ed Smith: I'm going to butcher his last name.he doesn't even know this. His name is Eric Holtman. I think, it was one of the Lennox trainings in Florida. He started talking about, home as a system and HVAC just being an engine of the home. He was demonstrating removing outlet cover and like how air moves through the cavity and the bay of the wall. If the top plate electricians didn't really, they make always bigger holes for them so they can pass the wires. So now we have in exchange, the attic really with the condition space.He was talking about customer experience. I'm passionate about people. He was talking how we should step up and serve people differently.
[00:05:42] Ilija Crnobrnja: That resonated with me and how I see the world at the same time we were pushing Mitsubishi. I was coming off of one of the Mitsubishi seminars, and there was a 3000 square foot house done with 18, 000 BTU single wall unit. And I said, Oh, my gosh. that's a first appearance of low load homes. so combining of these two things, I remember, like knocking David's knees while while Eric was talking and then really the love for building science came first. Minimizing the load of the home and then heat pump was just a natural response to that. Why? Because we had all this 60, 80, gas furnaces in the attic that were short cycling constantly. Because why we needed that? We needed 80, 000 BTU. So the cabinet can fit a four ton coil, so we can have an appropriate amount of cooling for the second floor, but inevitably, we enlarge the size of the furnace.
So furnace was short cycling constantly, and I said, wait a minute, this is just, first of all, we don't need it,
So I start replacing all attic furnaces for heat pumps. It was like initially swapping ducted, Heat pumps for furnaces
[00:07:00] Ed Smith: Yep.
[00:07:01] Ilija Crnobrnja: we still need a little support in the basement.
That's SumZero's belief. so we will always bring either electric backup if we change the furnace. but, that's the low load
homes appearance of heat pumps. We match them two together and they make so much sense for me. I believe heat pumps are it.
I don't think next 50 years, nothing will change. It's simple.
[00:07:23] Ilija Crnobrnja: air source heat pump is the future.
We can have ground source heat pump talk. We can have all this when you take the, all aspects of heat pump production and installation. I'm optimistic and excited. I think we have next 50 years to, enjoy this business and convert people's homes.
And that's what I'm excited about.
[00:07:42] Ed Smith: That's awesome.
[00:07:43] Ilija Crnobrnja: I always say heat pump cannot kill you. That's my first thing. I don't need carbon monoxide detector.
That just there is a freeing moment
[00:07:51] Ed Smith: Yeah.
[00:07:51] Ilija Crnobrnja: I lead with that with safety and simplicity and, really not necessary maintenance.
I lead towards that rather than efficiency.
[00:08:00] Ed Smith: I love that. Yeah. So you're at this other company, you're moving up, you're going to trainings, your love for building science and the heat pump tech is being ignited. What leads you to leave what seems like a successful career path at another company to start SumZero? And what did SumZero look like right when you started
[00:08:22] Ilija Crnobrnja: really what had happened, spiritually I was already gone. the place couldn't hold me there. As we left, I spoke with the owner whom I respect a lot. He's actually also brother from my church. It is an emotionally twisting because I never thought I'm going to leave. I was actually building this as my own, but I said, this is going to be good for you and me, just the way I was wired and David, especially,
He was really young at that point, butit's almost like a couple of guys and entrepreneurs that destined to do something on their own and you can't easily tame.
[00:09:00] Ed Smith: What an articulation of the entrepreneurial spirit? You grew beyond it and you had to create your own thing.
[00:09:07] Ilija Crnobrnja: I listen to Tommy Melo a lot from A1 Garage, and he said there's 4% of us, like these crazy maniacs. For me it's not financial. It's more to exercise this thing that I have in me. put out in a world that he may serve other people. Later I'm going to learn. It's really hard. I have so much respect for every business owner, especially HVAC business owner, because it's hard, hard, you
[00:09:33] Ed Smith: People are going to see that creativity and desire to make and problem solve throughout your SumZero journey as we talk about a few things, but, so when you guys leave. And you plant your flag what were you offering people at first?
And was it you and David, just the two of you?
[00:09:50] Ilija Crnobrnja: Just two of us
We were on the street with no plan, We just knew that we liked each other, respected and honored. And,we knew that we, the survival mode is up, right? We need to survive.
So we agreed that let's refinance the houses that we have. Both of us,
[00:10:11] Ed Smith: you both. Wow. And that's how you funded SumZero to start.
[00:10:14] Ilija Crnobrnja: that's how we funded the SumZero
Okay. Amazing. and then put money together, rent a little 700 space in Milford,incorporated SumZero and all this stuff. But initial model was really to be,concierge to the homeowner in, getting, Low load homes and heat pumps discerning for them, like being liaison and supporting customers, through doing initial testing. So we became quickly BPI certified. we ignited our passion for building science. That's when everything like we've talked to Eric. That was the first phone call. Hey, Eric from
[00:10:50] Ed Smith: Holman. Yeah.
[00:10:51] Ilija Crnobrnja: home. And, We talked to him and said, Hey, this is what we're doing. And that's great. And we told him you inspired us and, we're going to be doing building science and, sign up for a course with, Joe Lstiburek, went to his farmhouse. That was probably the moment of our lives. was architects from Rochester, New York, multi, multi,apartment buildings they're building and from all over the United States.
And somehow in each break, they were all surrounded around David and I. And we felt that really nobody understood HVAC. They had so much desires and green architects, and they were really trying to understand the HVAC, but, they couldn't. So we started explaining concepts, and, uh, really, Tuning in HVAC once you develop a heat load or manual
[00:11:40] Ed Smith: J
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:42] Ilija Crnobrnja: how to really tune in and there's a lot dynamics between efficiency of the system, but also the velocity.
And the capacity time the temperature rise, a much smaller temperature rise and your recovery is slower then you leave your people cold, because they used to their gas furnace, 50 to 70 degree temperature rise,
[00:12:04] Ed Smith: they come home within 10 minutes.
[00:12:06] Ilija Crnobrnja: They bring up 5,6,7 degrees. Heat pump doesn't work like that.
So there were all these conversations. And really, we were just adrenaline was up. We were passionate. Yeah.
But we didn't know what we were doing. There was no, our first website has three packages. We're going to do your blow door for 350. We're going to do a duct test and we're going to do this. And then we're going to give you a full report. We use the product called Snugg Pro.
[00:12:33] Ed Smith: yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:35] Ilija Crnobrnja: also we got personal coach. I want to give him a plug in one of the best people in the country. Corbett Lunsford.
[00:12:43] Ed Smith: Yeah.
[00:12:46] Ilija Crnobrnja: Best. so we were one on one every week with him.I signed up for his courses and that was the beginning of this passion for learning.
[00:12:55] Ed Smith: I don't know if we've ever talked about this, Ilija, but Amply started the same place SumZero did.
[00:13:00] Ilija Crnobrnja: Oh, wow.
[00:13:01] Ed Smith: We were doing for homeowners, like complete low load electrification.
Yeah. Yeah. That's, we did that for a year. it's interesting how our, both of us are in the same spot, but got to different places.
[00:13:13] Ilija Crnobrnja: Yeah, first job. in six months, we generated $350 one thing. And that was a lady calling us from, the city called, I think, Manchester of the sea.
I was like, I don't even understand this name. Like, where is this? It's two and a half hour drive. And that was the only revenue we had. And then in June, Of the year
[00:13:38] Ed Smith: Six months, 350 bucks. Okay.
All right.
[00:13:42] Ilija Crnobrnja: burning cash that we have
[00:13:44] Ed Smith: Yep.
[00:13:44] Ilija Crnobrnja: we're desperate. We're building website. We are learning all the things that we didn't anticipate what it takes to really run business.in it, I send a group message, through LinkedIn to my old friend. He's my now director of It. And like, Hey man, did I tell you I started the business? He's like, you like, yeah. He joined in. he's a, he's a software engineer, developer, manager, working from home, sustaining himself for the last 20 years, and the crazy guy decides to join the two crazy guys, young kids, and that's Marcello
[00:14:22] Ed Smith: Yeah. I was gonna say, Marcello is
[00:14:23] Ilija Crnobrnja: he's with us and he really changed our company
[00:14:27] Ed Smith: I didn't realize he joined that early.
[00:14:29] Ilija Crnobrnja: He joined 2020, He came into maybe I do a website or something small then he saw our passion and now he's with us full time.
Yeah.
[00:14:41] Ed Smith: It's the three of you. You had $350 to show for six months. Happens then? Yeah.
[00:14:47] Ilija Crnobrnja: from David's father's church congregant WhatsApps, David and said, Hey, do you still do heating and cooling? And we looked at each other. Yep, that's it. That was the beginning. we take the job who's going to install it now, you know, like we have no licenses, no, nothing, no,and then we went on the marketplace.
There's a bunch of little smaller HVAC companies.
Talk to a friend Hey, can you subcontract job for us? And he said, sure.he did one and then, phone calls start coming in and, we did another one and the third one and the fourth one. And we close a 2020 with $700,000. And we're like, we never saw this much money in our lives, you know? So it's like in seven months. Um, and then he's saying that's beginning of 2020. you guys are giving me more jobs that I can actually produce.
I hate selling. I'm like, I don't want to do this. So that, then they joined us. Meanwhile, Paul started with us
[00:15:49] Ed Smith: The man.
[00:15:50] Ilija Crnobrnja: David joined BNI.and he said, there's this young kid, looks like he's going to leave BNI. He's doing mold remediation at that time. And it's not really working for him. he said, I think should grab him. And we interviewed him and Paul said, let me think about this. and again, trust the two crazy guys and he's with us till today. Super Successful
[00:16:10] Ed Smith: Super successful.
[00:16:11] Ilija Crnobrnja: has done. With us, everything, simply everything from the beginning. That's, I think, a testament of a character,
[00:16:18] Ed Smith: from that, $700,000 in sales initially, were they all heat pumps or at that point? Was it like
[00:16:23] Ilija Crnobrnja: Oh no,no. That was, our dreams were still there, but we were surviving. That was Goodman furnace coil condenser.
[00:16:32] Ed Smith: Yeah.
[00:16:33] Ilija Crnobrnja: Full installation, for like new construction odd jobs.
Uh,crazy. we were given most of our money to subcontractors and we have a thousand dollars and we're like, yay, we have rent to make, you know, for, so it was that ugly.
It was really ugly. Yeah.
[00:16:51] Ed Smith: Wow. All right. So how do you get from there to now, the like heat pump focused. company you are today
[00:16:59] Ilija Crnobrnja: It's always the relationships that kind of pushed us up. And how we treat people, So much so that territory manager comes to sell us Trane and we develop this friendship. like close friends that I would consider like you and I, and, and he takes his own time and spends hours and hours to teach us how to price and People, folks from Mitsubishi really believed in us.
Really the reputation and, being respectful and being well with others, people push you that's, this is how it is. and our crazy desire to survive, I can't really recall. All the moments, but, honestly, like initially,I don't remember how we used to get the jobs, but 2020, we went to 2.
3 million. I think it was crazy. It was a crew and a half. There wasn't even a second crew, speed in which we were doing jobs and really quality control and us really wanted to everything look good. But we had almost this brotherhood relationship. That being your, being the boss wasn't even developed yet.
You didn't even earn your trust with your people.So it wasn't that it was this camaraderie between a bunch of young studs, uh, who all come with a ton of experience working in HVAC for many years, being good friends, we start developing doing great jobs and our name start, rising up within inspectors within community.
the last year revenue. We couldn't sustain through referral only. so that's really the good, public reputation and all that. But 2020, 2021, most of our jobs, there is no marketing involved. Came from people referring to their friends and family.
Um, that's my badge of honor. if you said the brand is reputation. And my reputation is that my customer love me. I think that's how you should bootstrap the business.
[00:19:01] Ed Smith: A hundred percent.
[00:19:03] Ilija Crnobrnja: 2022, I remember that data because data before that, who was tracking data?
[00:19:08] Ed Smith: You're in survival mode.
[00:19:09] Ilija Crnobrnja: of our entire work, 55 percent came,referred from
[00:19:13] Ed Smith: That's incredible. Word of mouth. Best kind of marketing.
[00:19:17] Ilija Crnobrnja: One of the places your commitment to your people comes through is in your training area. think your training area is something that most people wish they had. Would you describe what it is, what it looks like, what's in there, how you use it, and then why you built it?
I really wanted excellence out of everything. wanted something for our installers and our, tech staff really to touch and feel every day. We do training since the beginning, like three years in a row, Tuesdays and Thursdays, we teach our staff. Also, it's a philosophical position. HVAC industry.why the single truck guy sometimes doesn't want to scale. It's because of that, that he will transfer knowledge and then people will leave. And there's that fear that's always says, ah, man, I'm going to just stay myself.
I want to give you everything that I know. if I lose you, then it's my fault. There's something else I didn't do to keep you. actually believe that everything that I know and everything that I was able to excel as the leader in the office really sits on top of installers on the field.
They protected me so I can be in my office and I can be a thinker and I can develop better processes and buy back my time. I actually owe this to them.
That's, I also owe them to teach them, to put them in an environment. They're going to learn. And all for the love of customer.
Would you actually describe your training area?
Our facility is about 10, 000 square feet. And then there's one room, maybe a thousand square feet that we decided to make a mock up house, create lines of penetration Demonstrate the feelings they go in, for two reasons. One, so we create a SOP on how the systems should look like.
And the second reason is there was a influx of customer coming through our facility from like last two years, and they wanted to touch and feel. And I like them to do It's an expensive, project and I said, let me make it a little better for customers when they come and really make the thing out of it. and the third thing we said, I'm gonna really niche down what we do in terms of branding, what brands do we use, and also what applications do we use. So we took six applications. We solve every house's problem with six applications. And then we literally installed it right there. Um, you can troubleshoot them.
You can pick them apart. You can put them together. You can do whatever you want.
It's right there.
[00:21:59] Ed Smith: I love that.
[00:22:00] Ed Smith: You narrow down your applications, get enough that it covers your, the wide range of homes that And then your guys can be expert, deep experts on those new applications and they just do them exceptionally well every time.
[00:22:12] Ilija Crnobrnja: Yes. That's
[00:22:13] Ed Smith: That's great. Makes a ton of sense. Now, everyone I know in this industry talks about the difficulty of pricing and how the success or failure of a job starts as soon as that comfort engineers in the home, like they either price it and set it up the right way or they don't. and that just. It's going to land all the way through on your P&L at the end of the year,tell us about the problems you were experiencing and the solution you built. to solve it.
[00:22:40] Ilija Crnobrnja: The reason I'm laughing because last time we met in my office, I said, Ed, I have a list of problems that we can be talking about. I'm a problem guy. I like the last quote of Elon Musk when he said, we can't be just existing to solve problems every single day. We need to inspire for something that's greater ahead of us.
But, pricing model, it's almost a never ending, battle.
I used to be in sales. I would see four or five clients during the day, and then I will stay up till midnight. Doing quotes from home. So it came from pain and I didn't want this for my salespeople. So it all comes from that.
It's like my innate motives are beneath that, for them to be more productive and efficient. And on the other side, very strong motive was, I I think it's rude to take customer's time. an hour and a half of their time and then you said, I'll send you a quote. And then seven days later, you to send the quote. That's not a customer experience.on the backend of that.proposal is a love letter. It's a promise letter, and It's a stamp of intellectual property.
When Paul goes out and design, which he's brought up and thought out by David and I, this is it, I, it's very few people, that's going to come up with a solution for the house.
Like we did and that should be your promise letter and you should be protected. That letter is why I say promise because all other departments really stem off of that to deliver that promise. That's how literally when we teach leadership, that's it. Your job is to deliver. comfort consultants promise, verbal promise, not what's written in a fine print to the homeownerand everybody needs to fight hard.
[00:24:36] Ed Smith: That's poetic. That is the most poetic thing I've ever heard anyone say about a heat pump quote, but I love it because
[00:24:42] Ilija Crnobrnja: yeah
[00:24:44] Ed Smith: be that way. That's incredibly well said.
So what did you build, in house with Marcello to, to solve this, to deliver on that love letter?
[00:24:54] Ilija Crnobrnja: So it came from me yapping around the office and Marcelo coming from that space. He said, I can assist you with this, with the developers. He and friendships he has in Europe. We developed started developing this. We internally call a calculator. It has no official name, butit's a utility.
It's a tool. For our salespeople, really, we created a simple database loaded with a common parts that we use. And then we made sub kits and created master kits with a sliding scale on the commission side with that.
And it was never really completed, we're still working on it, but it's still useful.
Um, and used in the field. being a software company, Ilija, Software is never done, right? Which I didn't not know none of this stuff. And we embarked into this. My vision is still there. It's going to work on a back end, why is the promise letter?
Because once. helps the accounting a lot and helps procurement a lot because once this is produced on the backend through API, we can send information to our back office.
Now we have a lead coordinator, which is a,clients, success care that she will prep the packet for the installers and they will go to a walkthrough.
So the manager will go a walkthrough and then he goes to procurement. All that information digitally gets transmitted without talking back to procurement, and then he can actually buy this. Why I'm saying it's a promise letter because the proposal needs to be accurate because there's data there. It's not the words, it's actually data that we actually spilled back.
So he helped a lot, even though it didn't help in a proposal presenting way
we would like, it helped really streamline the processes. And then we have a sales manager who all his data for every calculation was done there. Then we have a finance manager who says, okay, this was estimated. And this is actual on a job costing side,
Then we can see discrepancies and then we can penalize the salespeople or we can give them a carrot.
So it's super useful. and I'm looking to develop this into something way bigger. That's useful for HVAC business owners because it's all there more on the side of controlling and leadership and incentive as well as proposal being, the thing. So the goal is really give the customer proposal right there within five minutes.
[00:27:27] Ed Smith: give the customer the proposal right there, but then that piece about how, the communication To everyone at SumZero, because it is a team effort to deliver on that proposal, how you've automated that so that everybody knows what's happening when all the way down through to retrospectively looking at a project and saying,did it come out the way we thought it would?
wo you mentioned incentives in there. And I know incentives in this industry are something that are near and dear to your heart. I don't get the sense that you've cracked this problem yet, but tell us about your view on where you would like incentives to go in the industry because I think it's just super intriguing.
[00:28:04] Ilija Crnobrnja: I have this passion for a no lid opportunity for people that you're going to be,paid based on merit and evoke potential entrepreneur within your team.
[00:28:16] Ed Smith: Mhm.
[00:28:17] Ilija Crnobrnja: And I think people should be incentivized, but I can notch it down to a, to an event. Where I thought that this makes no sense.where I had a 45 year old installer, my senior installer, who is still the best, comes once at 1 PM. And he said, Hey boss, do you have anything to do around the warehouse? And I said, my people will have dignity. I'm not going to have my best installer clean up the broom. The warehouse has two kids.
Cause I know as a man, you don't show up home early and, this is just not how it's done and we, they need hours, they need their hours. So they finished the job and you get penalized while the people who are accruing 55 hours a week, cause they're not efficient and they're not good. And I know this is a fact. It's a competing other crew, right? I said, something is up over here.
So yes, you can correct that by paying one guy more, but I don't think it's a solution. I believe in a base pay and then based on merit and efficiency of the team.
This particular installer is the best leader by far. He organizes his job. He's fast. He's the, so the results are there. He was out producing billable hours week by week. If he has 50 billable hours, 10 per day, he would generate 70 per week. Why? Cause he was finishing early. We were sliding the jobs back to him.
[00:29:47] Ed Smith: Mhm.
[00:29:49] Ilija Crnobrnja: And I said, he gets punished.
This guy finishes 50 billable hours that were sold to the customer, but bills me 66. I said, hold on. It just, and then from that point on, I became really dissatisfied with the whole system and start searching for, options where we can distribute that direct labor portion from that produced billable hour back to the installer.
And create the efficiency scale and put monitors on TV and really start have criteria for each team. And they can look at each other and said, it's a game.
[00:30:26] Ed Smith: Illija. I mean, this is, this has been great. Thank you.
One of the things we like to leave with is tactical recommendations. To folks who are in the heat pump installation business, If you were going to recommend like one or two. Tactical things, resources that someone could go and tap into right away.
What would those be?
[00:30:48] Ilija Crnobrnja: if you're passionate about this industry, start with building science. it is so much fun, uncovering it's ever changing. I watch Matt Reisinger. I watch painters. I'm understanding open vapor paint versus closed vapor. I close jobs based on this. I approach house and I see bubbly paint and I know either, it's, there's no insulation there. Uh, leakage of the house is elevated. We can do a blow door test and really discover right there.
And that's going to be a problem no matter how big of the heat pump you put in, So it's a great conversation starter right there. envelopes, condition spaces.really there's so many, FAQs out there. Do we put ducted heat pump in the attic? Do we don't put what is the really sweaty duct work? if you're a learner, this is, this space is awesome. I'm in love with this, with HVAC because it challenges us.
I'm excited because it's not going anywhere. It is the solution. despite all the naysayers, there's always an argument on both sides, um, and it's just going to give our industry a bread to eat and employment and jobs and, um, and I think there's room for everybody.I love my competition and I always say, I love you as long as you're taking care of the customer. When you don't, then I have a problem with you as you should have a problem with me.But if we're all together, the market is huge
[00:32:26] Ed Smith: Love it.
[00:32:30] Eric outro: 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.
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