Full transcript10 chapters · 9,780 words
00:00Fifty-three years of plumbing, heating and fireplaces
Chris Mazzini: We’re a 50-year-old family business that’s still growing because we never stop learning and investing in our people.
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off big.
Tyler Martin: Here’s your host, the Blue Collar CFO, Tyler Martin. Hey guys, got a fun one today. Today we are talking with Chris Mazzini from Aspen Wall Plumbing. This is fun to me because it’s about a family business and growth oftentimes in a family business can be weird.
Tyler Martin: I mean, you’re dealing with the family dynamics, you’re dealing with growth and it can, instead of creating freedom, it can really add a lot layer of complexity. And what I love about Chris is he’s got a 50 plus year family company in Massachusetts. They do plumbing, heating, air, and fireplaces.
Tyler Martin: And Chris walks through it with us, what it really looks like to modernize a family legacy operation moving from like paper calendar to service Titan without, and this is the big part, without losing the culture and the reputation that got them there. In this episode, we get
Tyler Martin: into the family dynamics, the systems that help them break past the 5 million mark and why hiring is still one of their harder problems. And last but not least, how they built a brand that people actually remember. You’re gonna love this episode. Even if you don’t have a family business,
Tyler Martin: I think there’s a lot to get out of it. And I think you’re gonna love it and really enjoy the things that Chris has to say. He’s a great guy. It’s no wonder his business has done so well. Very likable guy. Here we go.
Tyler Martin: Hey, Chris, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How’s it going?
Chris Mazzini: Good, good. Thank you for having me. How you doing?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, doing great.
01:52Running the trade side while his brother runs fireplaces
Tyler Martin: Thanks for being here. Would love to get to know you a little bit. I’d love to start out with learning what you do professionally would be my first question. Can you share that?
Chris Mazzini: Sure. So we are a family business. We do name of it as Aspen Wall Bay State Plumbing. We do plumbing, heating, air conditioning, fireplaces, service and installations. We’ve been around for over 50 years. I think we’re going on our 53rd year now. And it’s my father, my brother, Mike, and myself.
Chris Mazzini: And my father is retired now. So it’s me and my brother pretty much every day in it. And my brother runs the fireplace side of stuff. And I take care of like the plumbing, the heating, the air conditioning side of the business with a great staff.
Tyler Martin: Very cool. And then the term Bay State, does that represent, I wanted to ask this because I’ve heard it before. Is that just Massachusetts or is that an area of Massachusetts?
Chris Mazzini: It’s just Massachusetts. I don’t know if the nickname is the right name for it, but yeah, Massachusetts is known as the Bay State. So our work around where we’re located, we’re in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Our work is primarily done on what they call the South Shore.
Chris Mazzini: So that’s sort of an area of Massachusetts, which if you’re from around here, you know what it means, right?
Tyler Martin: Got it. Okay. I always thought it was kind of like, you know, I have Silicon Valley in my area. It was kind of like a territory of it, but it sounds like it’s all the state or the whole state.
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, the Bay State is, but the South Shore would be more like what you would equate to Silicon Valley. Yeah, exactly.
Tyler Martin: Okay, got it. And then what about a personal tidbit? Anything you could share personally about yourself?
Chris Mazzini: Sure. Yeah, I’m married. My wife is Danielle. I got three kids. One’s 20, soon to be 21, so that should be interesting. 18-year-old that’s a senior in high school and then a 14-year-old son that’s a freshman in high school. And so all doing great.
Chris Mazzini: My oldest daughter currently studying abroad right now over in Copenhagen and loving life. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: So do you see any of them entering your business at some point?
Chris Mazzini: I do. I don’t know if any of them have an interest right now, but yes, I would love to see them. I love to see any of them involved in it. But I feel like my son is maybe asking more questions about how things work lately.
Chris Mazzini: Really? And I don’t know if that’s an interest or just conversation. But yeah, you never know. He may want to step up someday. And so it’d be fun. It’d be fun.
Tyler Martin: I had someone come to me not too long ago. And he has, I think, three or four sons. And he said, you know, the whole plan was for my kids someday to take over the business. Not one of them are interested in doing it.
Tyler Martin: They’re all now in their 20s and they all went in different directions. So I guess you just really never know, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyway, okay. Hey, I wanted to start out with just talking about running a family business and, you know,
04:49From his dad’s paper notebook to a schedule they keep
Tyler Martin: probably at some point when your dad was in the business, how did that work? Like, was there ever friction from the family business? Was there, was it always kind of like everybody knew which lane they were in? How did that always play out?
Chris Mazzini: Yes. All of the above, right? My father’s background is plumbing. so he always stuck with the plumbing side of stuff my background is air conditioning I actually have an engineering degree and it’s mechanical engineering so before I started working here I was designing HVAC systems so when I came on board working with the family company
Chris Mazzini: my lane naturally was air conditioning so when I first started off right he was he was the boss right I like to run a lot of things by him just how we’re doing stuff if we’re pricing something what kind of jobs we should go after, that kind of stuff.
Chris Mazzini: Sort of the way the business was running. We were operating out of a notebook, believe it or not. We could just write everything down. People would call in for appointments. And it was, you know, it’s chaos. It’s total chaos. So it took a little bit to kind of wrangle that in
Chris Mazzini: and sort of prove that, hey, this is a better way to do stuff. And my father was very good. He’s very open to it and saying, yeah, let’s do that. Let’s do it that way. And without really understanding how or why we would want to do it that way.
Chris Mazzini: So an example of that was as we transitioned from a paper book calendar, say, to any CRM, we happen to use one now, Service Titan. And it took us a little bit to get there, but we would schedule appointments. And he was still of the mentality of, hey, if an emergency comes in, we’re going to have to move all these people and just kind of cancel appointments.
Chris Mazzini: right and thinking well yeah i mean this is more important than that or maybe the wrong way to say it but hey we got to take care of this before we take care of that and it would just sort of happen where he’d say oh no this is what we’re doing today and it was like well no we have this to do
Chris Mazzini: meaning we have these 10 people we need to take care of like why that why is that call more important than this call and it made sense why so i think that old mentality of of sort of showing up in the morning and like, no, we’re not going to do those calls.
Chris Mazzini: We’re going to do these calls was a struggle, I guess, maybe because to me, I lived and died by the calendar, by the schedule. I, these are the customers we’re taking care of. If we’re going to be a reputable company and say, Hey, you can trust us.
Chris Mazzini: You can call us. We’ll be there Tuesday. You made your appointment last week. We’re not going to reschedule because it’s the worst thing in the world for people. I would try to stick by that. Whereas he was kind of day to day. So sort of breaking them of that habit took a little bit.
Chris Mazzini: And it was tough because it was, he did it his way for so long that I think as he saw, yeah, this is probably a better way to do it. And he’d see like, as we treat these customers fairly and you see reviews coming in and look
Chris Mazzini: at people are happy. Like for somebody that’s been doing it since the seventies, you know, Google review meant nothing to them. Right. So now as you start to see them and you see, you know, Hey, we’re getting 10 of them, 20 of them, 50, a hundredths of them.
Chris Mazzini: And it’s like, oh, wow, this is really cool. Look at this. People really do know who we are. People do like our company. He started to see like, oh, okay, yeah, maybe what you’re talking about is making sense. Not to say that he was going to say, okay, whatever you say goes now.
Chris Mazzini: But that transition kind of started to happen a little bit in way of, you know, a new idea would come up. It would be maybe easier to approach and say it became more like, yeah, whatever you think, you know. So it was smooth, but still hiccups along the way.
Chris Mazzini: of various things. I mean, you know, that’s just, I guess that’s just on the scheduling side of stuff. You know, there’s some friction always comes up. Any family business, the biggest friction always involves money, right? I mean, that’s definitely the biggest thing and who gets paid
Chris Mazzini: what and why, you know, we should all be paid the same. Maybe we’re not all doing the same things that can be overcome. I think, I think some of the hard stuff is, is when, you know, you have, you have some weeks where it’s like, Hey, you know, I guess we’re going to pay everybody,
Chris Mazzini: but we’re not going to get paid this week. It’s like, who are we all doing that? We’re going to cycle through. Maybe you get one this week. Somebody gets one the next week. That leads to a little bit of friction. And then it makes it tough for sure. It makes it hard to run the
Tyler Martin: business and stay focused on things. What’s your philosophy? Is your philosophy family first and
09:18Family first, and not talking shop at Thanksgiving
Tyler Martin: no matter how bad things get or maybe the friction within the company, once I cross that line and I’m back into my personal life, none of that carries with me and it’s all family and we stay together? Or have you seen that kind of bleed into your personal
Tyler Martin: life where you kind of have to, you know, fight that so it doesn’t affect the relationship?
Chris Mazzini: No. So we are 100% family first. So that’s a great question, right? I like the way you put that. And that’s what we’ve always done. And what’s interesting, like Thanksgiving, we try not to talk about work because you can go down the rabbit hole pretty quickly
Chris Mazzini: and just start talking about it. We do talk about it naturally, right? Like, oh, hey, what’s he up to? What is he doing this week? But we try not to focus on it every time we see each other because then the relationship of your family
Chris Mazzini: just becomes business, which really, it’s tough. It’s tough to kind of break that, right? Because you still want your father to be your father. You know, you don’t want him to be your boss. You want your brother to be your brother, not like my business partner, right?
Chris Mazzini: So we definitely focus on family first. you know, we’ve definitely had arguments over stuff. Not everybody agrees. You kind of, kind of just got to learn to let it go a little bit. And the philosophy should be what’s best for the business, right. And making a business decision. And then obviously what’s best for
Chris Mazzini: the family, because I mean, we, we are together a lot, right. Not so much my father now that you’re tired, uh, but like we were all together a lot. And so yeah, it’s, it’s definitely a challenge.
Tyler Martin: That’s for sure. How do you, with your dad being retired, do you feel like you have to carry the torch of bringing the business to a certain level? Like where’s that stand with you? Is it like, okay, he’s retired and now it’s just our business and we’ll do what we’re going to do. Or are you
Tyler Martin: in your mind, like, I want to bring it to the next generation or the next level. Like what are your
Chris Mazzini: aspirations there? I think, well, yeah, I mean, I think we’ll do what we want to do, but yeah, I’m always wanting to grow the business. So our, our, you know, bringing it to the next level is definitely always top of mind. But it’s just not more, it’s not, there’s no more really asking,
Chris Mazzini: right? I’m not like, hey, what do you think of this? I mean, I do, right? We review a couple things. What do you think of that? What do you think of this? Maybe we’ll try this. But he’s not in here on a day-to-day basis or we’re not, we don’t have like a once a month phone call to see
Chris Mazzini: where we’re at to kind of make sure we’re moving in the right direction. I mean, as we talk on a regular basis, sometimes it’s just like, how are things going? Is everyone staying busy? You know, How’s that job going? How’s this job going? But not, he’s not like in a leadership role of
Chris Mazzini: trying to make sure we’re still on track to hit some, some kind of target at the moment. No. So it’s more of a personal thing really with, with me and saying, here’s what I, here’s what I want
Tyler Martin: to be. Here’s what we should be at a spot. So I’ve had a bird’s eye view of so many family businesses over my career. I think the one that has always stuck out at me is a father and son, a lot of friction. Father was almost threatened, for lack of better words,
Tyler Martin: by the son coming in and making changes. And so they had this constant, it was just really abrasive friction. And I’ve just seen so many family businesses that a lot of times there’s different types of, whether it be egos or like you said, maybe you’re going through a rough spot
Tyler Martin: and not everybody can get paid, or maybe someone’s going through a divorce and they can’t really participate in the business as much. There’s just so many different variables. I got to applaud you guys for being able to, you know, the way you say family first and just keep your mind there.
Tyler Martin: It’s easy to get off track when money gets involved in business. I mean, a lot of times
Chris Mazzini: we lose our focus, sadly. Yeah, you do. You definitely do. And it is hard, right? I’m not going to say it’s always smooth. Sure, sure. You know, you get a, you get a, you know, you’re still family, right? You’re still blood. So that’s, that’s more important than any of this really,
Chris Mazzini: right? I mean, that even plays into some of our core values, which is definitely, you know, we do employees, we do customers and community. And then, you know, anytime one of our employees has even an issue, you know, there’s always deaths in the family. There’s always
Chris Mazzini: something going on in people’s personal lives, right? You kind of look beyond the fact that
13:19Advice for a son coming into his father’s company
Chris Mazzini: they’re just employees because they do have things going on in their lives. And the more you’re into this and the more you talk to them, you realize that like, oh man, like once he leaves the office, there’s a whole nother something going on.
Chris Mazzini: It could be anything, right? Like you said, or it could be maybe something going on with their kids, something going on with their own parents. And, you know, my immediate message to any of them really is always go take care of your family. Like just go take care of them first.
Chris Mazzini: We’ll be here when you get back, go do what you got to do. So it’s definitely an important part of, of our culture here, which is, I guess, different than, you know, trying to just make a buck. Right. But it’s important.
Tyler Martin: What would be your advice to someone that’s either in a family business or it’s evolving into a family business? Anything, any advice or wisdom in terms of making that work or, you know, maybe reducing friction?
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, I’d say that you definitely need to be patient, you know, kind of keep the business to the business hours, maybe. Right. Try to try to force yourself to kind of talk outside of of just business topics constantly, because you can just keep going down that rabbit hole
Chris Mazzini: anytime you see each other. I think clearly defining the roles of maybe who does what is important. You know, I mean, I think just by default, somebody will always be considered the boss over somebody else, right? So maybe clearly defining that if there’s multiple people involved.
Chris Mazzini: But, you know, it’s tough because you really want to get equal effort from everybody and that’s probably not always going to happen. And so maybe just not holding that I’m against them so much, or at least maybe offering some advice on, hey, here’s something you could work on.
Chris Mazzini: Right. I mean, not everyone is equally capable of doing everything. So it’s hard to say, hey, you take care of this, because sometimes the answer is, well, I don’t even know how to do that. Right. I mean, a lot of times everyone’s coming up through the business.
Chris Mazzini: It’s not they may be good technicians, but they don’t know how to run a business. All right. So you have to kind of pick and choose the tasks maybe that each family member can do for sure. And naturally somebody can take on more than others.
Chris Mazzini: It’s just sort of the way it is. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: What is your advice in terms of like when you have dad who’s kind of always done it his way and then you as being the son coming into the scene and maybe seeing some things a little bit differently? What are some good ways of approaching that?
Chris Mazzini: Probably, I mean, one of our big things here too is always the why too, right? Like, here’s how I think we should do this and here’s why I think we should do that. And maybe explaining some of the benefits of doing it that way.
Chris Mazzini: Nothing happens overnight. You know, I guess it depends on your relationship with your father. I mean, my father’s pretty calm. I’ve seen him get upset, but he stays pretty calm. He’s open to new ideas. He loves when something like a new product came out in the plumbing world or the heating world.
Chris Mazzini: He always wanted to try that. So he’s always open to something new. So I think I maybe had an advantage on that. It’s just saying like, hey, here’s a way we do stuff, you know, and he would see the benefit of it. We would go to, we did a couple of like shows, like, you know, we were a member of Linux.
Chris Mazzini: So we went to some of the Linux live events and I’d bring them with me. And in there, you’d see a lot of the things that they’d lay out of why a company should do something. And, you know, you always get excited when you go to those events.
Chris Mazzini: So we used to go to them together and it’s a, Hey, you know, you’d look at five things, say, Hey, let’s try these two things and see how that goes, you know, and he’d be all excited. So we’d kind of get it going. And when you see benefits of it, it was kind of for me and us anyway, it was kind of easier. You know, if you, if you have to try to come up with an idea and you’re constantly fighting, that’s a tough road to go down. I mean, this just might not be a good match, but I guess, I guess it, you know, it has to be the father’s willingness to kind of let go too, which is tough for them because they started it.
Chris Mazzini: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of pride there. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard to, hard to give that up, but I mean, I don’t know. I got them very proud of this company and like really love it. And,
Tyler Martin: uh, maybe he just saw that shining through. So. Yeah, that’s very cool. Hey, I want to get into a little bit about scaling a business. Now, a lot of times I’ll see, uh, businesses get stuck in that like three to $5 million range. I know you guys have pushed through that. Wanted to talk a
Tyler Martin: little bit about what do you think has attributed you pushing through that kind of $5 million
17:48What got them past $5 million and onto Service Titan
Tyler Martin: barrier and get to the next level. Let’s talk about that first. What are your thoughts around
Chris Mazzini: allowed you to get, get through it? Yeah, I think, I think it’s a lot of things. I think it was, um, getting our name out there. I think a lot of, a lot of advertising with that TV commercial that we ran. I think that was an, that was an important thing just to kind of get our name out there.
Chris Mazzini: I think hiring great employees are being, I don’t know if lucky is the right word, but having great employees that kind of buy into what you’re trying to do is important. So it’s not just one person deciding, here’s what we’re going to do, and it suddenly works.
Chris Mazzini: But it’s just having a good reputation. It’s all that stuff of, you know, like I said, scheduling, like I was talking about, being there when we say we’re going to be there. Getting the great reviews is important. And just kind of building up yourself as a reputable company that’s trustworthy.
Chris Mazzini: and I think that really shined through on that advertising that we did with the TV because it featured my father and everyone just kind of loved the way he looked and loved what the message was and it was just a simple call Aspinwall and they just just a lot of people commented on like how
Chris Mazzini: authentic it looked so you know we used to get a lot of calls from that and I think just venturing out in way of adding the other services as far as expanding on the plumbing expanding on the heating expanding on HVAC, we deal a lot with the rebate programs in our state, which is called MassSave,
Chris Mazzini: and just really focusing on getting our name out there and being accessible to people.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Where did Service Titan come into this? At what point did you introduce it? And what, for those that don’t know Service Titan is a CRM, it’s kind of the creme de la creme, I would say, of CRMs in the trades world. It’s costly. I mean, there’s a big investment to it,
Tyler Martin: but you should get it back in return with better data. When did you decide to do that? Was that a big decision? Take us through that.
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, that was a big decision. Yeah, I mean, we’re probably in the like two and a half million dollar mark, maybe three million dollar mark when we first signed on with them because we had gone through a couple of them and we went through some less expensive ones.
Chris Mazzini: And it seemed they were kind of doing the job, but you could just tell Service Titan was going to be the one to go with. I mean, it did. It was very costly. And what’s funny about Service Titan, when we first started doing it,
Chris Mazzini: It seemed costly, but it seemed affordable. So we were doing it, and we were seeing a lot of return on it, and you really have to spend the time in setting it up, which is a big effort as far as price book and everything that goes involved
Chris Mazzini: into Service Titan, setting up the iPads and allowing the guys to work off them. It’s a total culture change from where you may be because a lot of people just like working off paper. But it was just a nice transition to getting to this program.
Chris Mazzini: And I say it was costly but affordable because it’s a nice program for what you were getting out of it. I mean, if I’m going to be honest, it seems like it’s creeping up a little more than it should. It’s getting very expensive.
Chris Mazzini: And we use a lot of features where we use Marketing Pro and we use a lot of reputation management through it. And there’s a lot that you can do with it. But at the same time, it seems a little higher cost. And again, just my sole opinion of what it should be.
Chris Mazzini: But I mean, we just we live and die by that program and we’re in it every day. And it definitely is a huge, huge benefit and help to to increasing our business for sure.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Do you feel like was there anything that you felt like you kind of hit a wall in terms of breaking that five million? Were there any challenges that you had to get through in order to get over the five million dollar hump?
Chris Mazzini: I think definitely a leap of faith is the right word, but definitely like spending more in advertising for sure. You sort of have that trust and saying, yeah, let’s hope that this works. And then finding good employees is definitely the biggest hurdle, which still continues to this day.
Chris Mazzini: That’s just an ongoing problem, which I’m hoping we start to see a shift in that. But it was that. I mean, we built a lot of nice relationships up with some of our local property managers that we do a lot of work with.
Chris Mazzini: And we really kind of focused on expanding work with even them. and just saying, you know, hey, I know we take care of three of your buildings, but how about we take on five, you know, and just kind of building that relationship.
22:05Property managers pay slow, so he wants more residential
Chris Mazzini: That seemed to work out pretty well for us, too. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: Whenever I see property management in the HVAC and plumbing space, there’s pros and cons to it. I think, you know, the pros being probably, and correct me off anything if you see it differently, pros being consistent business, but the cons are very slow paying.
Tyler Martin: And sometimes margins can be a little bit of a challenge. What are your thoughts around that? And have you done anything to circumvent those issues?
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s exactly what you said. I think that’s the benefit of doing the work. The cons being the slow payment. What we do is they have a payment processing system, and we just make sure that we’re up to date on that constantly.
Chris Mazzini: And then we have our person in the office checking weekly as far as what’s coming in for payments and making sure all invoices are actually in the system as they should be, making sure they’re getting the approval that they should be. The downside is even though when that stuff is all aligned and perfect, you’re still waiting on one person to press the button to send the check.
Chris Mazzini: So we looked into even ACH payments through the vendors and just saying, hey, if we do this online, you think you could send us a payment faster? And their answer was no. The check or ACH is going to be at the same speed.
Chris Mazzini: So I think what happens is, you know, the big companies, it’s like everything you look at them, oh, they got tons of money. Why are they not paying these bills? I think it’s probably cash flow for them is just, you know, waiting for the rents to come in.
Chris Mazzini: It builds up in the account. They pay everything. And then then they have to do it again next month. And so, you know, we try to make sure we’re on top of it, which we are a lot. And it’s just constantly checking to make sure, hey, we’re going to get paid.
Chris Mazzini: We’re getting paid. You always do get paid. But, yeah, it seems to take a little bit. It seems to have been taking a little bit longer, I would say, this year. And I don’t know, maybe it has to do with the tariffs. Maybe it has to do with what’s going on in the economy.
Chris Mazzini: Just look at their money a little bit differently.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. For what it’s worth, I have another client in the United States. I won’t really say the location just for privacy, but they also are very heavy into property management. And their typical collection, believe it or not, is over 120 days with a lot of those property management firms.
Tyler Martin: And, you know, me being the not so believing side, say no way we can get them to pay you faster. Well, it’s really hard because you got to go through their portals and it’s very slow process, very laborious. I’m almost resigned to the fact that 120 days will be the fastest in that segment of the
Tyler Martin: business. The only other alternative at that point is, you know, do you go more into like a COD type business where you’re dealing with, you know, direct residential individuals? What’s your thoughts around being more focused in that side of the business?
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, I mean, I do. It’s kind of what I’m thinking with 2026 coming up is kind of really focus more on residential customers. And I think it’s a nice way of doing work, getting paid, kind of being known. Right. Again, one of our core values is community and these customers live in our community. Right. So, I mean, it’d be nice to sort of like even help them in that sense. But the COD is definitely a nice way to go.
Chris Mazzini: Now it’s a culture of making sure the technicians have the ability to talk to the customer, explain what they’re doing, and collect the money, too. Because you can get into battles all the same as far as, well, nobody told me that’s what it was going to cost.
Chris Mazzini: I didn’t know it was going to be that expensive. I need to talk to the owner. I need to talk to a manager. And it’s not in every case. I mean, it probably happens, who knows, 5% of the time. But it seems like it’s every customer, even though it’s not.
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, yeah. So you just kind of get that feeling. But it becomes more of a communicative process for the technician where doing the work is the easy part, right? Like I can come in and fix your heating system. That’s easy. Unfortunately, here’s what it’s going to cost.
Chris Mazzini: That’s those soft skills that you have to teach these technicians and they have to be comfortable doing it, right? I mean, dealing with these people that have to ask for money and at the first words of, no, I think it’s too much money.
Chris Mazzini: They kind of just fold and say, all right, let’s call the office. you know, which then just puts you right back into non-COD business. I think in a perfect world, I like the mix of, you know, the light commercial with residential customers, just overall as a
Chris Mazzini: company, because, you know, to be honest, there’s more, a lot more residential customers than there are the property managers. So to me, it’s kind of a nicer side of doing things. We try to stay away from all construction altogether. It’s because it’s just not our forte. We’re not good at it.
Chris Mazzini: We don’t have the manpower for it. And we just don’t like being yelled at for no reason. So we
26:40Teaching technicians to collect at the door
Tyler Martin: just have that business altogether. Yeah. Do you think, you know, you talked about training. Do you think it’s hard for the technician who, when they’re doing the property management side, they’re not really having to deal with as much discussion around probably pricing and
Tyler Martin: collection and stuff like that. How do you do that? Like, how do you get, because now you’re like, okay, when you’re residential, I want you to be somewhat of a salesperson. I don’t know if that’s the right terminology, but I want you to be more involved with the collection and the,
Tyler Martin: hey, this is what it’s going to cost you. Whereas most of the day, if they’re doing like commercial, they’re probably not dealing with that. Is that fair? And what are your thoughts?
Chris Mazzini: Oh, that’s totally fair. That’s exactly right. So we try to separate the people that we use for the commercial side, we’ll call it, versus the residential side. Obviously, there’s a cross between the two because some days you need to use that person at a residential house.
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, I mean, it all depends on the person because some guys, it’s no problem at all. They just know I’m here to do a job and you’re going to have to pay when you’re done. And we always have our talks in the office are, where does the pricing start? Should the person answering the phone
Chris Mazzini: explain to the homeowner, here’s what the price is. Should they explain that you’re going to collect at the end of the job? Should they try to build the invoice before we even get there so that the technician doesn’t have to do it? To me, it’s a combination of the two. If the person answering
Chris Mazzini: the phone can be upfront and just say, you know, are you home? Somebody’s going to be home because at the end we have to collect. And then the technician has to sort of take it from there, which would be a layup to say like, hey, I’m here to do the work, which in anyone’s mind would
Chris Mazzini: understand that they’re going to have to pay for it. It should all work together. And the guys naturally that do the residential work all the time, it’s probably a little bit easier than the guys kind of flipping between the two, you know, naturally, but everyone understands that it has
Chris Mazzini: to be collected. And we talk about it all the time. It’s just the execution of it, right? It’s the, nobody was home. I didn’t see them. They said, it’s fine. You should just build them. And then it’s just bringing it up again. Nope, we have to collect.
Chris Mazzini: We have to collect. And so. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: There’s probably some like incentive type plans too that I imagine could be built around encouraging collection as much as some would might say, hey, that’s your job. There should be no incentive. And then some might say, yeah, I can build in some type of incentive as part of their
Tyler Martin: overall job. And they maybe get a little spiff or something. Yeah. I mean, probably a good idea just to see if it drives more collections. Yeah.
Chris Mazzini: But sometimes I wonder if you just, if you don’t have, if you don’t have that communication skill, it’s tough to, it’s tough to learn it. Yeah. It’s tough to even, you know, you try to say, oh, I just have to train these guys.
Chris Mazzini: Well, no, not everyone’s a salesman. Not everyone’s good at speaking with people. Sometimes they just don’t know what to say. And so, yeah, it’s tough.
Tyler Martin: So I had a guy named Lou Hobica on my podcast. He was about, I think, 20 episodes ago. I can’t remember how long, but his philosophy was when they started an academy, a training center, he’s, he claimed, and I’m assuming this is true. He literally let go of all of his journeyman
Tyler Martin: people. And he said, like, I just, they weren’t willing to bend or do the business the way I wanted them to do it in terms of being dressed a certain way, doing all these kind of touchy feely, feel good things that make the customer feel good. A lot of the journeymen, he said,
Tyler Martin: were just kind of set in their ways. And he just, he, he wasn’t able to train them. So he started over, he started an academy and he ultimately, I’m not saying he did it all at once, but over time he did it. And he ended up training these people to have the soft skills along with the technical
Chris Mazzini: skills. And he felt for him, that was the only way he could do it. Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of truth behind that too. I could kind of see that because people get comfortable, which is, which is good and bad. People get comfortable and then they just don’t want to, they don’t
Chris Mazzini: want to help themselves get better. Right. You want people who are going to improve themselves for sure. And I could see his point to that where you could hire someone based on their personality and probably train them on the technical side. As difficult as we like to pretend this may be,
Chris Mazzini: you maybe could train some people on the technical side of stuff. But if they have that nice award-winning personality, I feel like some people are a little more forgiving if it’s like, okay, I can’t get to that today. I’ll have to come back tomorrow.
Chris Mazzini: So, yeah, I could see his point to that to some degree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to say I’m doing it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I do not recommend that unless you really know, you know, you really have a plan in place because that could destroy a business. So I want to talk, I want to go back to marketing. You had mentioned about the TV campaigns that you did with your father.
Tyler Martin: Can we talk about that a little bit? How long ago was that? What were you doing? Was it effective? And if it was, are you still doing it?
Chris Mazzini: So let’s see, that was probably, you said it had to be three or four years ago now.
31:39Why he may go back to the call Aspinwall TV spot
Chris Mazzini: We were running the commercial. It was effective in the sense of people would always tell us they saw the commercial. People would say the slogan was call Aspenwall. We would get that everywhere we go. We would wear our shirts. If you had a logo on the shirt, random people would come up to you and say, oh my God, I saw your commercial call Aspenwall.
Chris Mazzini: And we heard it all the time. We were unable to track any kind of ROI on it just because our advertiser told us there’s really no way to do it, which I tended to believe. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know.
Chris Mazzini: But we weren’t really able to track it and put a number on it. And so we ran that for probably about three years, which was great. And we stopped doing it. I stopped doing it purposefully because when I went to our new advertising agency, I wanted
Chris Mazzini: to see how good they could do without any of that stuff happening. And I looked at the business. I started thinking about the business as an on-demand business where, hey, my water heater broke today. Who am I going to call? So you’re going to your cell phone saying, you know, find me a plumber near me.
Chris Mazzini: I need my water heater. I have no heat. Help me today. So I was under the impression, oh, yeah, that’s where Google LSAs come into play. You have to have those. PPC, you need all that stuff. I didn’t know what any of that stuff was.
Chris Mazzini: And everything is bidding on names and words, and you got to outbid this guy. So we would kind of throw money at that to see how that was working. And to be totally fair, I would say for two years, we’ve been with our ad agency, and I’d say we’ve been flat.
Chris Mazzini: And I don’t, in my opinion, I don’t think it really worked. And I think their excuse is, well, we didn’t put enough money on it. We got to put more money on it. We have to increase the budget. And I would just be, I would just stick to it and say, no, here’s the budget.
Chris Mazzini: Make it work. Like do whatever you think is returning some kind of money. So we kind of just, we kind of got stuck with that. And their excuse every time is just like, yeah, well, you know, you just need to increase that or we’re just going to be where we are.
Chris Mazzini: And that’s it. So that leads me to today, which has got me rethinking, why don’t we go back to our commercial? Maybe I’ll go back to that and run that and see what happens again. Because again, feeling stuck in between where we are now and where we’re trying to go.
Chris Mazzini: Let’s go back to what we knew, which was the TV commercial and advertising a little bit more and seeing how effective that can be. because I heard all kinds of things, but you know, everyone’s an expert and they’ll tell you like, ah, TV, that’s not good for, you’re not going to get any return on that. And I don’t do that. You
Chris Mazzini: have to do this. And it makes you wonder why, what do they know? What do they know that we don’t know? Because it seemed to work pretty well for us. And I think somebody summed it up the best, who’s a friend of my father’s and he did TV forever. And he says, TV, all it’s doing is
Chris Mazzini: building brand awareness for you. You may not get a call that day. You may not get a call next week. But if they see it enough and they remember when my water heater goes, who am I supposed to call and call Aspimol? Then you know it’s working.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I like that call Aspimol. Okay, good stuff. And then just on that note, where does this take you in terms of next goals? What’s your big next goal? Is it a revenue goal? Is it a legacy thing you want to sell your business someday?
Tyler Martin: Where do you fall in in terms of your next big thing that you’d like to hit?
35:01Chasing $10 million and saying no to private equity
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, this is great stuff. So our next big goal is to hit $10 million a year in revenue. Love it. Right. So that that’s our next goal. Now, I love like, yeah, what’s what’s what’s the next steps? What does it look like from a few years now?
Chris Mazzini: Because this is kind of I didn’t know where to stand on this, but private equity is driving me crazy. I don’t know if they’re listening. I’m sorry. Stay away from family businesses. I don’t want to sell this business. I want this business to run.
Chris Mazzini: I’d love it if a family member took it over, preferably my son, of course, and continue on the legacy of Aspen Wall Plumbing. That’s what I feel should happen. We’re not looking to go anywhere. We’re looking to be around again for another 50 years and continue to serve our community, our customers, and bring on new generations of employees.
Chris Mazzini: And just make it be a place where people are proud to come to work, want to show up every day and do a good job. and we get calls about the company. You see it all the time. Hey, you know, any interest in selling a company?
Chris Mazzini: Why don’t you give us a call? And we don’t want to do it. That is not at all the plan. And I think it just, it changes things. It changes the marketplace for sure. I’m sure they’re good at scheduling appointments and showing up.
Chris Mazzini: But when you start buying companies and paying a lot of money, they have to make a return on that money. And the only way it’s going to come back to them is by what they charge the customer. And we’ve heard it a lot from customers that call us saying,
Chris Mazzini: hey, you know, so-and-so came over and this is what they were going to charge. And I mean, we’re probably half the price of some of these people. And it’s just amazing to me. It kind of makes me, I don’t know if I’m feeling bad,
Chris Mazzini: but I just think people should rethink some of this stuff. You know, the $99 tune-up, we’re going to show up to your house and come in and do all this stuff. It’s really not customer focused, in my opinion. I just think that they’re just changing the marketplace,
Chris Mazzini: hopefully not changing what people think of contractors because there are a lot of good ones out there. No matter what TV show you watch or what you hear from people, there’s a lot of bad people out there that you can stay away from,
Chris Mazzini: but there’s still a lot more good contractors out there. Not just us, just in general. There’s a lot of good family businesses out there that are really trying to do the right thing. Right.
Tyler Martin: I guess I have mixed emotions about the tune-up using that as an example. Like, I think that’s a really, it does have a legitimate value add to it. Like, I like the thought of it. I know I’ve done that from my own home.
Tyler Martin: And I think it makes sense. Where I get a little frustrated or maybe a lot frustrated is when companies, and there’ll be guys on the internet, on YouTube talking about this, where they do those $99 and they’re going to come back with installs.
Tyler Martin: And to me, what that basically says is it doesn’t matter if the person really needs an install or not. Their function is to go out there and sell an install through fair, probably uncertainty and doubt and get them on a finance package. And that’s where I kind of I would say this about cars or any other type of repair that would just bothers me because it’s like you probably don’t really need that service yet.
Tyler Martin: Yet someone’s coming out and do it. If the tune-up is really about just maybe finding things if something is wrong, they’re going to fix it or just clean it up and whatever they’re going to do on the tune-up, great, clean it or whatever and keep it at that, I’m all for it.
Tyler Martin: I mean, what are your thoughts around that?
Chris Mazzini: I totally agree with it. Yes. I think if you get a tune-up or you get a maintenance, which I highly recommend, and we do it too, having your system maintained twice a year. I equate it to even when you buy a brand new car, you have a new car, you drive that for a year,
Chris Mazzini: you still need to put some kind of maintenance into it every year. I mean, you could spend $500, $600 just keeping your car running the way it should. I think it’s the same thing with any kind of HVAC equipment, plumbing equipment, heating equipment, anything. You have to spend a little
Chris Mazzini: bit of money to keep it maintained. And it may be that it’s a maintenance with some extra parts. So you have to do that little bit of extra every year. I’m thinking people are using that lower dollar maintenance as a way to get in the door and just get your ear and talk to you about all the things that you may or may not need.
Chris Mazzini: I’m not going to say they all go in and try to fool you into getting something you don’t need, but it seems that the lower prices are relevant because it’s not really the fair market value of what that maintenance should be. Doing a maintenance for $99, if you could hire someone and they come in and they go in and clean it up and do it and you pay them and you never hear from them again, then that was $99 well spent.
Chris Mazzini: But I just don’t think that’s the intention of the tune-up. And I don’t know if it’s unfair. I mean, the customer’s the one making the decision. So I guess maybe they’re not doing anything wrong. We just don’t operate that way. We have our maintenance prices.
Chris Mazzini: We come in, we do what we’re supposed to do. And then we offer suggestions saying, hey, you should take care of this now so you don’t have to do it three months from now. And we’re just trying to keep the system up and running because a lot of this stuff is expensive.
Chris Mazzini: but you want to keep that equipment running as long as you can.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. One thing that I found interesting in my research about you guys is you do have a membership program and the way you do it is a little bit unique in terms of what you see in some of the other membership programs. Sometimes you’ll see the $9.99 or $19.99 a month and you either get a discount or maybe
Tyler Martin: you get one free service. You guys kind of do, I think you do one full service or two full services a year. and according to Google, for whatever it’s worth, it’s a little bit on the higher end in terms of pricing, but I believe you do like a full-on service. Is that correct?
Chris Mazzini: That’s correct. Yeah. So basically all we’re doing is taking the two maintenances that we do in the year and just spreading it out over the monthly cost. That’s what we’re going to do. And then on top of it, you get the membership benefits of discounted services. You’re going to be in our
Chris Mazzini: program so that you get preferred services. We also do a nice one of our plans offers a a credit towards a new system. So every year that you’re paying into it, you accumulate money towards a new system, which may or may not eventually come,
Chris Mazzini: but we do make it so that if you need to put money towards that new system, that at least we credit you back something, right? And it’s sort of as a thank you as being one of our members. But it’s all equal. All the services are sort of spread out
Chris Mazzini: over the course of the year so that you’re not just paying it one time or two times on top of the benefits that you’re getting out of the program. Very cool.
Tyler Martin: Hey, a lot of good stuff here. I want to come to wrap up here. I want to talk about one last thing. Do you have a mantra or some type of thing that, you know, saying or something that you kind of live by or that you often say to people?
Chris Mazzini: Yeah, the one that comes to mind is, like I said, victory loves preparation, right? And so that’s one of my favorite ones of just always kind of being prepared. And that could be for anything. It could be for the meeting that you have coming up.
Chris Mazzini: That could be for the quote that you’re going out to deal with, the customer you’re going to meet. It could carry on into your personal life, whether you have kids that are into activities. You just want to make sure they’re ready ahead of time.
Chris Mazzini: You can’t just show up and expect things to happen, right? You definitely have to prepare your day, prepare your week, and just be ready for what’s coming on.
Tyler Martin: Very cool. A lot of good takeaways. I think a big takeaway for me was just as it relates to family businesses. You gave a lot of wisdom around making it work and not letting the friction overcome your personal relationships. I thought that was a huge one.
Tyler Martin: You talked about getting your name out there. I think the TV advertisement sounds like an interesting thing to revisit. So I think that’s another big takeaway from me. Other thing that we didn’t touch on too much in terms of getting the $10 million, I think one thing that hit for me is around building a small leadership team.
Tyler Martin: That’s one thing I often see when businesses are trying to get from that 5 million to 10 million, they start to build that small leadership team. So that would be another takeaway that I would say that we could take from this podcast. All good stuff.
Tyler Martin: Your websites, I’ve got Aspenwall Plumbing is your .com is your main one. Then you also have AspenwallFireplaces.com. And then, of course, your LinkedIn, I’ll put in the show notes. If people wanted to reach out to you, is LinkedIn the best place to go to?
Chris Mazzini: That’d be a great place to go, sure. So that has all my information on there, phone numbers, emails, everything. So that’s a great starting point. And always looking to add followers. I always try to add tidbits of information there. I think one of my latest blogs or notes is just about whether our heat pump’s actually saving us money.
Chris Mazzini: And I’d love to get commentary on that because sometimes people are all over the place on that. So it’s just good to put food for thought out there and just let people think. Everyone always has a different approach to things, but it’d be nice to kind of hear the different sides of the good, the bad, the ugly.
Tyler Martin: For sure. I’ll be sure to include your links in the show notes. Chris, you’re an awesome guy, awesome conversation, a lot of wisdom you shared. Can’t thank you enough for being part of the show.
Chris Mazzini: Thank you. I appreciate it. This is great. A lot of fun.
Tyler Martin: So my biggest takeaway from this episode and with Chris is long-term growth isn’t one bold move. It’s the compounding effect of doing fundamentals well year after year. Chris kept coming back to reputation, keeping your word with customers, putting real systems in place so busy seasons don’t break you, and protecting relationships inside the company,
Tyler Martin: especially when it’s family. I see this a lot. Owners stall out when they chase new tactics instead of building operational consistency and a brand people trust. Sometimes the old playbook still works. Like old is great. The playbook is there. You just need to tighten up the execution.
Tyler Martin: If you want a second set of eyes on pricing, cash flow, or the path from 5 million to 10 million, I’m here to help. Book a no pressure intro call at cfointrocall.com. That’s CFOintrocall.com. As always, thanks so much for listening. I will see you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- The $2.2 Million Lesson Every Home Service Owner Should Hear – Chris Lee
- Fired at 19 to Running a $3M Service Business – Brandon Saiz
- How to Scale From $1M to $10M Without Lowering Your Standards – Treasure Boston
- Your Best Tech Is About to Walk – Chris Buttenham
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: profitandgrit.com or Book a free intro call.
