Full transcript10 chapters · 9,298 words
00:00Raised by a mom who cleaned houses and a one-legged dad
Treasure Boston: Most people think that a strong vision in a business brings people together. That is so far from the truth. A strong vision is actually designed to separate people. It will pull the right ones in and repel the wrong ones. That’s why we say uncomfortable things in our interviews on purpose.
Treasure Boston: We bring the people that fit our culture in and push the ones down the street that don’t.
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. Most owners spend a decade trying to scale from $1 million to $4 million. Treasure Boston did it in 12 months, and her team raised the 2026 target from $8 million to $10 million because they thought $8 million was too soft.
Tyler Martin: Today, we’re going to talk about how she’s building a culture that actually wants the bigger number, what she’s learned about acquiring legacy brands, and the operating standards that make 3x growth possible without the wheels coming off. This is another great one. Let’s get into it. Hey, Treasure, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How’s it going?
Treasure Boston: It’s awesome. Thanks for having me on.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, thanks for being on. I’m so excited to talk with you. I’d love to start out just introducing you to the audience. If you could tell me a little bit about yourself in terms of what you do professionally, and then maybe if you could share something personally.
Treasure Boston: Yeah, I’ll start with personally because that’s what drives me to do what I do professionally. I’m a mom. I have three amazing kids. My oldest is 22. I’m in Liberty Lake, Washington, in between Spokane, Washington and Coeur d’Ale. My oldest son is in Austin, Texas.
Treasure Boston: I have a 17-year-old, well, going on 18, that’ll be graduating and will be playing basketball down in Southern Idaho. I have an 11-year-old that’s still in elementary school, moving on to middle school. So everything that I do is to be an example to my kids.
Treasure Boston: And so I’ll start with that. On the personal side, I have an amazing husband. He’s my business partner. He’s my best friend. We’re with each other constantly. His office is just on the other side of mine. He happens to be at our HVAC dealership in Bozeman, Montana this week.
Treasure Boston: But I’m blessed to build businesses and build life with my best friend. Professionally, we build and scale businesses in the home services industry. I’m currently in Clines Heating and Air in Spokane, Washington. We acquired this business almost exactly two years ago. I believe it was May 16th, 2024. We also own Comfort Systems of Montana. Largest privately
Treasure Boston: held HVAB dealership in the state of Montana, I believe, were a factory authorized carrier dealer. Was founded by my father-in-law and his brother in 1999. And then we also have a demolition company in Bozeman, Montana. We just got into abatement and asbestos removal, just got our licensing last
Treasure Boston: week. So yeah, we’re all over the boards while we’re still young. I still think, I don’t think my kids think we’re young, but we feel like we’re young. We’re in the season of life right now where we have the energy to grow and build and make an impact. So that’s what we’re doing.
Tyler Martin: Why home services? What made you decide to go in this direction to build your little mini empire?
Treasure Boston: Yeah, that’s a great question. I was raised by a blue collar mom and I know work ethic. In fact, My biological father is 92 years old and he lost his leg at 17 years old. He was training for the Olympic trials. He’s 92 and still works full time.
Treasure Boston: And he’s never allowed his handicap to define who he is. In fact, if he said anything about his handicap, it would make him very, very uncomfortable. He just had a full knee replacement surgery a couple months ago and is back at it. We just bought life insurance policies and an insurance salesman from him a couple months ago.
Treasure Boston: My parents divorced when I was, I don’t know, about 10 years old and my mom started cleaning houses. My mom raised us from that point on and I watched her bust her ass day in and day out. She kept the house that we grew up in and we grew up in middle, upper income neighborhood.
Treasure Boston: My mom kept everything together by cleaning houses. She put us in braces and was very conservative with spending a great steward of the family financials. But I learned work ethic from my father. He never had an excuse for his circumstances and still doesn’t make excuses for his circumstances.
Treasure Boston: And my mother, who is 74, she got remarried and she still cleans houses full time. Not because she has to, but she’s got a servant heart and doesn’t want to slow down and keeps her physically active. So I was raised by my mother and I have two aunts that also clean houses still.
Treasure Boston: So I was just raised in that environment that you work hard and your input financially equals your output. We don’t make excuses. We just get things done. So I went through a divorce myself about seven, eight years ago, and I started building a house
Treasure Boston: cleaning business just the same way that my mom did to get out of a marriage that wasn’t good for me and my children. And so I followed her example and started cleaning houses. She started snowboarding going down south and I would pick up her houses for her while she was gone and then started
Treasure Boston: building on my own clientele. Then I started bringing on employees, put together a team and built a house cleaning business, just exited out of that last year. And then I met my husband, I’m married to now, and he was raised by a father and male mentors in his life that also came from
Treasure Boston: the blue collar world. So now that we’re married, we both speak that same language of hard work. and we were both business owners individually outside of each other before we met. And then we got married and we continued to grow and scale together.
Tyler Martin: Do you, when it comes to home services, so cleaning obviously is one model and then you have HVAC, I believe you have two HVAC, the one in Montana and then the one in Washington, correct?
Treasure Boston: Correct.
Tyler Martin: Do you have a preference? Like where do you see yourself going? Is it, because it sounds like you’re getting into some restoration, if I heard you correctly, the newest one, where do you see yourself going? Because it seems like those different types of
Tyler Martin: businesses, kind of their models are different and they’re probably take different type of skills and things like that. What are your thoughts around that?
Treasure Boston: Business is business. It doesn’t matter if you’re slinging pancakes, if you’re slinging cleaning services or AC condensers, business is business. The financials are all the same. Departments might be a little bit different, but business is business. HVAC is a great industry. You wouldn’t want me coming out and diagnosing your air conditioner or your furnace.
Treasure Boston: Or you wouldn’t want my husband coming out for that matter either. He can design a beautiful new construction home in the highest neighborhoods that you can imagine up in Big Sky, Montana. But we all have our strengths and we lean into our strengths.
Treasure Boston: What those are for me, it’s building teams. And my husband leans into his strengths and his skill set on the install and design build side. And then we have our team that fills in all the gaps. You just hire the people that are the
Treasure Boston: experts and the best in that area. But HVAC is great. When you look at the economy and where we are now, you want to find something that’s insulated. So it doesn’t matter who’s president,
08:00Buying Clines with no CRM and everything kept on paper
Treasure Boston: what state you’re in, what’s going on in the market. We love HVAC because it’s insulated and people are always going to need heat and they’re always going to need cooling.
Tyler Martin: Have you had any in the business that you’ve acquired, any experiences where it’s like, oh, we didn’t anticipate that or maybe the numbers weren’t what were presented? Any surprises post-acquisition?
Treasure Boston: All the time. And I mean, we’re far past acquisition at two years that just had a conversation this morning. We’ve got to raise our prices. The market doesn’t stop changing. Costs don’t stop changing. inflation doesn’t stop and it might rise and fall at different rates, but you constantly have to be
Treasure Boston: looking at your costs and making sure that you’re keeping up with your margins. But when we bought Klein’s Heating and Air Conditioning, it was a great, it was a legacy company, was built on the right foundations of integrity, trust, doing the right thing, and had a sterling reputation.
Treasure Boston: I had no Google profile, no social media. The website was, I’m not even sure if they had a website, not sure it was maintained, but no Google advertising. The clients built an amazing business based on word of mouth in commercial service, which is crazy. So when we took this business,
Treasure Boston: it was ran archaically, but it worked for them because they were at 1.2 annual revenue. They could do things on paper. They weren’t looking to grow. They were comfortable where they were at. So when we bought the company, we went through due diligence process. We looked at all the
Treasure Boston: financials, but things, a lot of everything was kept on paper. So it was hard to do an accurate analysis and find what numbers truly were. But I don’t think that that ever changes from the time that you acquire a business. As soon as you acquire it, even if you know what the numbers are,
Treasure Boston: The numbers in the economy don’t stop changing. So you constantly have to stay on your toes and be able to pivot in an ever-changing marketplace. But I don’t think that there’s such thing as an acquisition where you, no matter who you hire, how deep of an analysis you do, there’s things that you don’t think of, costs
Treasure Boston: that you didn’t think of. In this case, there was no CRM. Everything was on paper. So there’s large costs that are associated with bringing on a CRM, especially Service Titan, in getting up to date and pulling things forward into 2026.
Tyler Martin: When you acquired it with, it sounds like it was 1.2 million, mostly commercial business. Was it your intent? Hey, we’re going to focus more on residential and grow the residential side of the business? Or was it double down on the commercial side? What was your strategy there?
Treasure Boston: Opportunity doesn’t wait for preparation. we wanted to stay prepared for any opportunity. And we knew what we wanted to get into was service. So in Montana, we’re predominantly 80% new construction, commercial new construction. And we know that that’s not the business model
11:10Grabbing a competitor’s phone line after they shut down
Treasure Boston: that we want to emulate here. And we have a weak service department in Montana. So we acquired a company that is a service department. So it was a weakness for both Michael and I, we have to learn how to run a service-based HVAC company.
Treasure Boston: And the residential customers that Client Heating and Air had were, nobody was picking up the phone and calling us to replace their furnace or their air conditioner. It was a commercial customer that needed a favor or a side job. And so like I said, opportunity doesn’t wait for preparation.
Treasure Boston: We’ve been really cued in on opportunity, waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. And it did one day when we had a service tech come in with a resume from one of our competitors, a company called Air Control. They’ve been in business since 1986, a very known company, mix of residential and commercial.
Treasure Boston: And he told us that they closed their doors. And he went to work and was told he didn’t have a job. So immediately we queued in on the opportunity, got on the phone with the owner and got to work on acquiring their assets.
Treasure Boston: This company had at least seven EEOC complaints for sexual harassment. So we wanted nothing to do with their name. We didn’t want anything to do with the reputation. But we knew it would be very valuable to have their phone line and pick up those calls from customers that have been calling since 1980, 86.
Treasure Boston: We wanted their website. We wanted their social media pages, all of their digital footprint. So in acquiring those assets, it gave us a revenue stream with the residential service site of things. And we acquired their service manager, too. So then we had the know-how on how to run that residential side.
Tyler Martin: Talk about being in the right spot at the right time and then jumping on the opportunity.
Treasure Boston: Yeah. That’s really cool.
Tyler Martin: Hey, so what is the mix now with clients? What’s the residential versus commercial?
Treasure Boston: I would say we’re about 50-50 as far as time allocated. Of course, the revenue that we generate is a lot higher from commercial because the size the equipment is a lot bigger, which means it’s a lot more, it costs more. So we’re generating
Treasure Boston: more revenue on the commercial side of things, but through marketing and really hitting the different marketing channels hard, we’ve grown substantially in the residential side of things too. So I’d say that they’re keeping pace with each other, but our marketing efforts have definitely
Treasure Boston: been going towards and geared towards growing the residential side of our business.
Tyler Martin: Okay. So you’ve tripled revenue, I think even probably exceeded that. And some numbers when we talked the first time in our pre-call, I think you said you went from $1.2 million to $4 million in a year, and then you even raised some bars. What changed did you make that triggered that growth? Was it the acquisition of that company that had all the sexual harassment claims, or was there something else that was the big trigger for change?
14:18Everybody rows or they get off the boat
Treasure Boston: It was a combination of things, but I would say that if there was a number one driver for our growth, it’s our team. Everybody is looking for opportunity at every call. Think of it as, and how we explain it to our team, is everybody’s in a canoe and everybody is rowing.
Treasure Boston: In organizations, you might have people that maybe aren’t rowing as fast. and sometimes you might have people that their ores just aren’t in the water and sometimes you have some folks their ores are in the water and worst case scenario you have people that are
Treasure Boston: paddling backwards it’s really important on our team that we know who everybody is and what they are contributing to our boat and our expectation our requirement is that everybody is rowing and it hasn’t just become my requirement. Our team requires that of each other through, through
Treasure Boston: accountability. And when you get everybody growing and rolling in the same direction, everybody’s growing in the same direction and you start winning and winning is really fun. Winning is contagious and you make money when, when you win. So we had a three-part interview process. So we’re
Treasure Boston: very selective about who we bring into, to our culture and filter them carefully on who’s going to be a contributor. And when you have an entire team that’s contributing, it just throws gasoline on the fire. So you can find opportunities. You can buy businesses, but there’s a lot of businesses
Treasure Boston: that you can acquire their assets, acquire the business, and it might fizzle out. You might get some short-term benefits, but it’s definitely been through the efforts and attribution of our team
Tyler Martin: that has been the biggest driver in our growth. I’m totally with you, and I can hear it in your voice and every conversation we’ve had, you guys have a great team. The one thing I just wonder though, is, you know, things ebb and flow in the business. And it’s always like one side,
Tyler Martin: one area of the business is always trying to catch up with the other area. And then as soon as you get that area caught up, then the other side of the business is behind. So how are you like, without having a lot of friction, like, cause I think the numbers you threw out to me
Tyler Martin: and feel free to correct me if I have anything not accurate, but you went from 1.2 to four in one year, then your goal was to hit around eight. And now you guys are blowing it out so much. You’re even thinking about 10 million as being your ceiling, which is just like mind
16:42Whack-a-mole friction and celebrating breaking shit
Tyler Martin: boggling. But usually there’s friction in that. Like there’s some level of, you know, something can’t, you can’t find enough good people. And I’m not saying you, but generally there’s, I can’t, I got all these leads. I can’t find enough people. I have all these people. Now I don’t
Tyler Martin: have enough business. How are you guys managing that where that friction, I’m assuming it’s but I’m just curious what that friction is, if there is it. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Treasure Boston: Absolutely, there is friction. There is, there’s friction every day. But what we’ve done is we have trained our team to relish in this friction. If we don’t have problems, we are not growing. Right. Really problems are just, there are opportunities that present themselves as problems,
Treasure Boston: but it’s opportunity what we’re seeing. So yes, absolutely. We have friction. I call it whack-a-mole. It’s like the grown-up version of whack-a-mole. You think you’ve got one thing handled and then it’s another thing and then it’s another thing. And there’s strengths and weaknesses in each business.
Treasure Boston: For example, installers. We are hard up for installers right now. We need installers, but we’re not going to change the standard to which we hire for. So some of our commercial technicians and our residential technicians that know how to install. Maybe it’s not where they’re best served, but they’re pitching in and helping on
Treasure Boston: some of these installs. So we have a team that will collaborate, will fill gaps. I don’t think I, I don’t have anybody on my team that wouldn’t help the CSRs out and pick up phones in the front if phones were ringing off the hook. But there’s always gaps that need to be filled. In Montana,
Treasure Boston: our strength is installation. We’ve got installers that have been with us for a long time, some tenured guys that are some of the best in the industry. We have to bring guys over from Montana. Actually, we have some installers, some 1099 guys that are in Spokane helping us out on a project.
Treasure Boston: Just had to call them and send them out to another project that they’re not even here for because we’re so far behind. But what’s a strength in one business can be a weakness in another business, but what’s strength today can also be a weakness later because, I mean, different level, different
Treasure Boston: different devil. Every time you grow, it exposes another area in your infrastructure or in your systems, your operating processes that you have weakness and they need to be redesigned. So our team knows that we call it breaking shit. We’re going to break shit, but we have to be transparent.
Treasure Boston: We have to communicate through it and we have to be willing to take ownership in our mistakes and ask for help. So we know that we’re going to screw things up. We screw things up every day and we celebrate that because we know that if we aren’t failing,
Treasure Boston: we can’t move forward. So it’s something that we expect when somebody screws up. It’s not about what the screw up is. It’s about what we can learn from it, what SO key we can wrap around that so it doesn’t happen again and fixing whatever blind spots we had
Treasure Boston: that led us to that failure.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. You just brought up SOPs. Are your businesses driven a lot by SOPs?
19:50Writing the SOP even when the standard sucks
Treasure Boston: Yes. We have to have SOPs. And when we bought clients, they had some written SOPs, but our growth has accelerated our team’s ability to create SOPs. So that is an area that is definitely a weakness right now. And in talking about gaps, another gap that we have is the right leadership.
Treasure Boston: And sometimes it takes going through filtering through some people and just like there’s a seat on the bus for the right people. But it’s really important who you have in those key leadership positions, especially when it comes to documented processes and SOPs. And so that is something that
Treasure Boston: we’re working through right now, but we talk about SOPs on a daily basis.
Tyler Martin: It’s a never-ending process. Plus, if you’re somewhat newer to ServiceTite and integrating those SOPs with your own process and tying them all together, it kind of feels almost like it never ends because you’re just always probably trying to improvise and make them better and
Tyler Martin: fit your business better as you grow. So it’s definitely a living type of project.
Treasure Boston: Yeah, Tyler, you’ve really hit the nail on the head with that. There’s a best practice and best practice might not even be what’s best. But if that is the best that we have right now, we still have to document it. Because when we find a better practice, we don’t even have anything to replace to like
Treasure Boston: we need a standard. Even if the standard sucks, it needs to be written down. So when we find a better way to do that thing, we know exactly what we’re we need to know the bad behavior and have it documented. before we can replace it with a good behavior.
Treasure Boston: So it’s something we’re in the process of now. But even when you do find a best practice, chances are that there’s going to be another best practice that you can use to reshape that SOP or create a new one entirely.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, especially your rate of growth. I mean, your problems at $4 million are a little bit different than $8 million and $10 million as you go up that chain. You know, one thing I want to ask you, you talked about the rowing example,
Tyler Martin: which was awesome, by the way. when you get that person that’s rowing in the opposite direction, and I would think it happens for you guys occasionally, how decisive are you about that in terms of dealing with it, even if it hurts in terms of like you need a technician, but that, because sometimes, you know,
Tyler Martin: I’ll use technicians, I don’t mean to pick on them, but sometimes you’ll have these real elite technicians and maybe they don’t go in the same direction as the rest of the group. Are you guys
Treasure Boston: pretty decisive about that? Or how do you handle that? Yeah, slow to hire, quick to fire. And I would say usually it doesn’t even make it to me. Heart team is so good at weeding people out. And I trust my team. If somebody’s not working out, the guys will flush them out. And the thing about
Treasure Boston: culture is when you have a really strong culture and a very intentional interview process, you attract the people that are like you. And we say things that are uncomfortable in the interview
23:04The noon workout and asking if you make your bed
Treasure Boston: process. We talk about our core values. They’re not just words that are written in a manual because some business guru told us that we need core values. Accountability, discipline, transparency, get shit done is actually GSD is one of our core values. Alignment, transparency. These are things
Treasure Boston: that we talk about in our interview process. And you can see people get a little bit uncomfortable and wiggle around in their seats when you start talking about accountability and transparency, because there’s a lot of people out there that just want to hit a time clock.
Treasure Boston: They want a J-O-B. They want to do what’s required and aren’t willing to go above and do the things that are unrequired to go from good to great. And if they can’t do that on an individual level, we can’t have a team that can move from good to great.
Treasure Boston: So very intentional in the interview process. I sit in on all of our interviews, every single one. I still want to hand select everybody that is coming into our organization and will always cast a vision. People think that a vision is to bring people together.
Treasure Boston: It’s to separate people. So very intentional in the words that I use for the interview process, because I’m not trying to bring somebody into our way of thinking. I’m trying to separate the people who think and operate the way that we do and pull them
Treasure Boston: outside and apart from the people that don’t do things the way that we do and don’t live up to our core values. And our whole team is pretty good now about, like, it’s pretty apparent by the time we get to the third interview of who’s client’s material and who needs to go
Tyler Martin: apply down the street and work for our competitors. Can you give me an example, like, in those interviews of, I think you mentioned words that you use, or how you, to the best that you can, how you find out someone’s going to be accountable or like the things that you’re asking?
Tyler Martin: Because everybody says, oh yeah, I’m accountable. I have high level of ownership. Everybody says that. Everybody says, I want to work 60 hours a week, whatever. You know, they’ll tell you what you want to hear. But sometimes when you ask those right questions, you can tell from the answers, it’s a little
Tyler Martin: different.
Treasure Boston: Yeah, so true. So in the conference room where we do our interviews, we have a big whiteboard and every day at noon, an alarm goes off. We’ve got like five Alexas in the office and an alarm will go off. And everybody that is in the office reports to the conference room and we stop and do
Treasure Boston: a 12 o’clock workout every single day. It’s usually three to five minutes. It could be like 20 pushups, 20 squats. And everybody picks something different every single day. And people will see that on the board. and you know, right, right away. And it’s not required.
Treasure Boston: It’s certainly not required. But you can tell somebody’s mindset and what they’re willing to do and be part of a team and be better and live in that domain of growth by just looking at the whiteboard and seeing what we’re all about. I ask this one question every single interview,
Treasure Boston: every position from an install apprentice to a higher level leadership position. do you make your bed in the morning? And you can tell so much about somebody by if they make their bed in the morning or not. And most people say yes, because they think it’s the right answer.
Treasure Boston: But I can always tell when somebody stops and hesitates and they’re trying to figure out if they should tell me the truth that they don’t make the bed or they do make the bed. But it’s such a telling answer. And then I explain to our applicants why that matters. Because if you can’t
Treasure Boston: do something as simple as make the bed in the morning, how you do one thing is how you do everything. And if you can’t start your day with a win and it shows me that organization isn’t important to you, you’re starting your day off on the wrong foot. So especially with an installer
Treasure Boston: or a technician, I’m going to guess that your van is a mess. I mean, we’ll go out and check their personal vehicles too, by the way, while they’re interviewing. But how you do one thing is how you do everything. And somebody that makes their bed is probably going to have awesome lines,
Treasure Boston: 90 degree angles. There’s just a lot of correlation between that question and how somebody operates on the day-to-day. Another question, it’s not really a question, but we call them the four Cs and there’s four kinds of employees. There are content employees, there are committed employees, there’s compelled employees, and there’s content employees.
Tyler Martin: Do you want to say content?
Treasure Boston: Content and complacent. So we got content and complacent, compelled and committed. And asking people where they fall in, into those buckets is really telling because we have an absolute no tolerance for anything that is complacent in our organization. So when they tell on themselves and they say, I’m really content or really complacent, it’s
Treasure Boston: just an automatic disqualifier.
Tyler Martin: Right. Right. You’re looking for more of a growth mindset, people that want to improve. So this kind of cracks me up a little bit. So people walk into that conference room and are you like literally like there’s an ham wrap, a five minute ham wrap on the board?
Tyler Martin: Is that what we’re talking about? Like some type of workout that’s based on time or something? Is that is that what they’re seeing?
Treasure Boston: Everybody in our office takes ownership in it. It can be different every single day. I didn’t have anything to do with this week’s workouts. The office already has them up posted on the board and it’s just become a break. It’s a social thing.
Treasure Boston: It’s just a reminder that it’s the small things that move us forward. It’s process. We have to live in the process and that’s how you find results is through process. And so it’s just one of those small processes that our team has that moves us forward to
Treasure Boston: results. And it seems really, it could seem really stupid to stop and do a three minute workout, but it breeds collaboration with the team. And collaboration is the highest form of currency. So anything that we can do to make the team stronger together,
Treasure Boston: find ways for them to struggle together, as weird as that sounds, it makes it really fun to grow together and keeps the collaboration alive.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, no, I love it. I love how you said collaboration is currency. I never really thought of it that way, but it’s true. I also actually think, I kind of mad at myself for never thinking of that. I think it’s a good idea to actually do a little workout, assuming people want to voluntarily
Tyler Martin: participate. What a great, we always say, hey, we never have enough time. Are we, I mean, everybody can come up with three minutes or five minutes if the company is willing to sponsor that and be okay with it. And like you said, if we’re all doing it as a group, it kind of encourages everybody.
Tyler Martin: I think it’s a cool idea. I think it’s different.
Treasure Boston: Yeah. And the accountability behind it too is awesome. Sometimes we’ll have somebody on a call and they can’t make it, but I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to see somebody walk by my office and go in the conference room 10 minutes
30:00Why she wants comfort advisors at $20K a day
Treasure Boston: after the workout was done to go get their workout done because that’s discipline doing the things that we said we would when we don’t feel like when we don’t feel like it or when a circumstance came in prevented us from doing that. I mean, there’s so many excuses that we can give ourselves,
Treasure Boston: but if we can be accountable in the small things, I trust me to be accountable in the big things. So it seems really small and insignificant and silly, but it has been a huge culture builder for our team.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, very cool. Hey, so I want to, one segment of the show, I usually try to talk about, I call it the number, and I try to talk about a couple numbers. And in our pre-call, we talked about a 20K a day goal and then 400K a year.
Tyler Martin: Can we get into that a little bit more? What do those numbers mean? How do you monitor those? Just talk through that a little bit. I’d love to just dig into this.
Treasure Boston: Yeah, so comfort advisors. I just hired another one for Montana last week. And one of the questions he asked me was, what is my, like, what’s my shift? With my sales guys, I don’t care what they’re working. I care about, like we talked earlier about process
Treasure Boston: and process breeds results that care about their process. What I want to know is that my guys are successful and that they’re engaging in the right activities to be successful independently. And if we can create that, then we’re going to be winning as a whole.
Treasure Boston: So ideally, I’d like my guys taking two to three appointments a day. I mean, that’s their target, three appointments a day. If those are coming in and it’s demand season and the phones are doing their thing, Google ads are working, our website and our marketing team is doing their thing,
Treasure Boston: calls are coming in, if they’ve got two or three calls a day, I’m off their back. But if we only have an appointment a day or they have a day that they don’t have any appointments, that’s when I’m going to start caring if they’re in the office. I want to see their activity. Expect that they’re
Treasure Boston: making 100 touches a day with customers unless they have two to three appointments booked out. But I want my guys making $400,000 a year. And if they can make $20,000 a day, which is totally possible if their mindset is right and they’re engaged in the right activity.
Treasure Boston: Appointment guys making money, I want them winning. But once you get these guys to a standard where that’s what they’re making and they get comfortable making that, it’s really easy for them to engage in the activity because they know that that’s what it takes for their families to win.
Treasure Boston: They see the bigger picture, they know how much they can make. And sometimes it takes a little bit of energy, but I don’t think that you can be as like, you’ve got to pick your battles. And one of the should be one of the liberties of being a comfort advisor or sales position in any organization is a little bit of time freedom.
Treasure Boston: These guys get called in on the weekends. They can go in late at night. We expect them to come in when it’s unrequired. But as long as the activity is there, I don’t care if they’re taking their kids to school in the morning.
Treasure Boston: I don’t care if they are bouncing early to head to their kids gymnastics meet or volleyball game. I don’t care. I want them to do those things. And that’s one of the great things about a sales position is it does lend that flexibility.
Treasure Boston: But get shit done is one of our core values. So is accountability. And in disciplines, we have to be disciplined to engage in that activity, to book those two, three calls a day if they’re not coming in organically sourced. But yeah, I want my team winning.
Treasure Boston: I want them making money. We talk about goals, clients, comfort, and job site solutions. I know my, I’ll show you this. I actually have it right here. This is a binder of everybody on my team. It’s a client’s heating and air conditioning. And in this binder is their goals.
Treasure Boston: I know my team’s one-year goals. They’re three-year goals. They’re five-year goals. I know what’s important to them, why they show up every day. And it’s, you want to focus on the goals and attach processes to those. and that’s where you get your output and your results.
Treasure Boston: So that’s how I manage my sales team. I know everybody does a little bit differently, but at the end of the day, we’re here for results. So whatever that process looks like, as long as we’re engaging in the activity that’s gonna move the needle forward, I’m good with it.
Tyler Martin: So you actually get into, you know what each salesperson’s why is, what they’ve defined as their why?
Treasure Boston: I do.
Tyler Martin: Wow. What are, without obviously disclosing anything confidential, But what are common whys that you find with salespeople in general? Like, is there a certain hot and pop button? Is it all about just making more money or is there a common why that you find?
Treasure Boston: So we discuss personal, professional and financial goals. Everybody’s goals are very closely related on financial goals. It really just depends on the person. People that have children could be putting their kids through school. Some people get it really just varies. And I wouldn’t say that it’s specific based on sales or any other role.
Treasure Boston: It’s just where people are relative to their environments and their personal life. But one, if there was like a common thread that went for everybody, I would say health and fitness is a collective goal that everybody has. And that’s one of the reasons why we do our 12 o’clock workout.
Treasure Boston: And one of the reasons why I push myself so hard every day to not make excuses and make sure that I’m showing up for myself because I’m showing up for everybody in that binder that has goals that are similar to mine. But I would say health and fitness is similar.
Treasure Boston: Making money is honestly not a primary driver. Opportunity for advancement and personal growth, those are both big topics that we see. And then on top of the goals, I meet with everybody on my team once a month. And we talk about ideas, updates, challenges to their goals
Treasure Boston: and where they’re at professionally and they’re in their positions. But it’s really important that we know where our team’s at, what they’re struggling with. And when they’re winning, that we celebrate that together as a team.
Tyler Martin: Very cool. Just wrapping up this numbers part of the segment, I think you had said to me in our pre-call,
36:19Stop copying competitor pricing and dig into your overhead
Tyler Martin: your revenue per service tech, you’re kind of averaging, you’re looking for like four to 600K a year in terms of yearly production. Is that roughly the range that you’re looking for your techs?
Treasure Boston: we’re going through and reanalyzing everything right now our overhead um has continued to go up in fact i don’t think the numbers that we have right now are accurate we just had a meeting about that this morning and we have a new financial person that will be starting next week um but
Treasure Boston: we’re going through a full apex analysis of where we’re at right now and i don’t think that our numbers are accurate but as a business owner like you have to be intuitive enough to know that Even when you have those numbers, if they aren’t making sense to you, you have to dig
Treasure Boston: deeper because sometimes you’ll think a number is right, but you have to think, why am I so attached to that number? Where did that number come from? What things have changed since I came up with that number? And business is just, it’s constantly evolving.
Treasure Boston: Overhead is constantly changing. We just moved into a new building. We had a lot of capital expenditures last year, which had affected our overhead. And so it’s changed our net profitability. So there is no one size fits all and everybody’s rates and what they’re what they’re charging, whether it’s their average service ticket, what they’re expecting or what their standard is for each van to be to be making.
Treasure Boston: I hear a lot of people talk about like what it should be in the industry. I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. I think that it should be specific to what you are. It’s important to know what your competitors are charging. It’s important to know that you’re in the market.
Treasure Boston: But at the end of the day, it all relates back to your profitability, your bottom line, and making sure that you understand the why behind the prices that you’re charging, what you’re paying, your staff. It all should mean something and be connected to something, not just an opinion based on what somebody might be doing down the street or what you heard in a podcast.
Treasure Boston: You really need a financial team that understands your business, that you can trust their advice to make sure that your targets are in alignment with what your financials are and where you’re going.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I love that. So many times we do, we’re really paying attention more to our competitor than our reasoning for why we’re doing what we’re doing in terms of pricing or profit. And I interviewed a guy, I haven’t published it yet, but his name’s Lawrence Castillo.
Tyler Martin: Great guy, built a very, I think he’s up to $70 million a shop. But one of his first hires was a financial analyst type that literally would just give him the data he wanted every week to be able to understand his numbers. And that’s an extreme because I know a lot of us don’t do that.
Tyler Martin: But I think that’s just kind of what you just explained, just knowing your numbers, knowing the why behind it, and then making decisions based off that. I think that’s really powerful.
Treasure Boston: There’s a lot of people that make decisions based on opinion. I want data. In fact, opinion, like we all have a gut. We have an intuition. God gave us that for a reason. But we need concrete evidence. It’s we need concrete evidence to to have that backs up our our decisions.
Treasure Boston: Otherwise, we’re just we’re shooting from we’re shooting from the head.
39:37Running a meritocracy with starters and a bench
Tyler Martin: Yeah. OK, I want to spend the last few minutes. You basically run your company like it’s a sports team. You’re a professional athlete. What what does it mean? Like, what does that mean? I know that maybe the workout is one example, but what does that mean to run your team like
Tyler Martin: a sports team? What do you do that emulates that?
Treasure Boston: So we’re a meritocracy here. And I have team members that have been with us for a long time. Comfort Systems of Montana, we have our senior residential new construction guys done with us 18 years. And so we have a lot of tenure. We have some technicians that have been with us 14 years, 10 years. They never had another job. They came here straight out of HVAC school. And they are awesome people.
Treasure Boston: They are those star players that you build a team around. But as we’re building our teams, even those guys know that we don’t have room for complacency like we talked about earlier. And those guys are leading from the front. But we have our starting bench.
Treasure Boston: And anybody in our organization has a spot to be a starter and can work their way up to whatever level they want to be at. It’s not based on how long you’ve been here. And that gives you rights over other people. Like who’s going to show up?
Treasure Boston: Who’s adding value? Who’s bringing something to the table? And that’s what we reward here. High performers and high performers love high performers. Mediocrity loves mediocrity, but there’s really not room for the high performers in mediocrity to coexist and live together. And you see that on sports teams.
Treasure Boston: You’ve gotten your high performers and your starting players. And then the ones that don’t want to show up, put in their extra shots, get in the extra time in the gym outside of their unrequired practices. And they really can’t coexist. And we’ve built a team of high performers that repels the mediocrity.
Treasure Boston: There’s just, it’s not because we won’t allow it, but the culture won’t allow it. But there’s a lot of similarities between how we do things here and not because we work out together, but it’s a mentality. It’s a Mamba mentality. It’s that winning mindset.
Treasure Boston: My husband and I have a personal coach that we use, a mindset coach. His name is Ben Newman. You might know him. He’s one of the top 10 speakers in the world. We train. Well, I am an athlete, but we train our minds like an athlete.
Treasure Boston: We want that competitive edge. We want our team to have that competitive edge. And if you have a team of people that like really don’t care about winning, aren’t invested in kicking the crap out of the guys down the street and winning that in Spokane, it’s called
Treasure Boston: Best of the Inlander Award. We took second place our first year doing residential. We took second place and people have no idea who we even are. But we have that momentum that it’s like a champion, a championship team. It’s our guys that are soliciting those reviews and bringing our customers into it.
Treasure Boston: In Bozeman, we won the Best Bozeman Award last year. We took number one. So you have to want to win and find it unacceptable and repulsive to know that somebody else is beating you and taking your customers. And we hire for that. We train for that.
Treasure Boston: We talk about it. And it’s fun. Everybody wants to be on a winning team. If you’ve ever played sports in your life, you know what it’s like to have somebody crush home run after home run on you, demoralizing loss. Like nobody wants to be on the losing end.
Tyler Martin: Do you worry about being able to scale that type of model? Like, is that possible? I mean, obviously at eight to 10 million, hopefully still very possible. But at some point, do you run out of that type of mindset where you can keep scaling
Tyler Martin: with that type of mindset?
Treasure Boston: No, there’s no shortage. of good people. And I think that’s kind of what you’re, what you run out of people with that mindset. There’s so many awesome people that are working for competitors and they’re there because they’ve been there a long time. But I have, this is a stack of resumes
Treasure Boston: that I have to go through. That one even has a nice cover full drawer. Actually, he’s on his second interview. He’s on a write along with our guys today.
Tyler Martin: That’s hardcore.
Treasure Boston: We have created a company that everybody wants to come work for, but we are selective about who we bring on through our process. But excellence attracts excellence. And there’s a lot of good people out there that just don’t know that there’s something else out there for them.
Treasure Boston: And it’s our social media team. If you follow our socials, clients heating and air and comfort systems in Montana, it’s not just for our customers. It’s been an awesome recruiting tool showing what our standard is. And even people that think that they hit that standard
Treasure Boston: and sometimes don’t.
Tyler Martin: How does compensation play into this? Like, obviously you’re trying to get the best of the best and have the right attitude. What’s your philosophy around compensation? Where do you guys want to fit in in terms of how you’re compensating your team?
Treasure Boston: Yeah, that’s a great question. Every position should have its entry level and starting number and then where you’re maxed out at. And our team should know what they need to max that out. And when they max that out, then they’re ready for the next level.
Treasure Boston: It’s something that everybody should know. So our jobs are posted like that. When we go through the interview process, we talk about that. There’s a lot of skilled people that don’t have in Washington, in Montana, it’s like the Wild West. You don’t have to have a journeyman.
Treasure Boston: You don’t have to have permits. In Washington, it’s very regulated. We can’t change a thermostat without pulling permits. So we care about who has their electrical training cards. If you can run gas pipe in Montana, you can just run gas pipe here. You have to have your MEC 1 or MEC 2 certifications.
Treasure Boston: So our team should be paid based on the certifications that they have. But there’s a lot of companies that will hire anybody and not require them to have those certifications. And just because they can, they will let them. But we require the certifications.
Treasure Boston: If you’re going to be doing those things, we don’t need to get L&I fines. And we want to be on the up and up and making sure that we’re doing things the right way. But compensation should be tied to that. So if you’re an entry level position, you should know for your EPA, you get paid this
Treasure Boston: much more for your MAC-1, you get paid this for your NAIT certification, an extra 50 cents. Here’s where you max out. Here’s where the next level is as a senior tech. And if anybody wants to earn additional income, they have opportunity to do that.
Treasure Boston: Everybody gets a 3% commission on any equipment that’s sold based on the activity, the they have driven to result in somebody calling in or ordering new equipment. And if they want to have call lists, we’ll have our marketing team give them phone numbers,
Treasure Boston: emails, and videos, whatever they need to make that extra income. But yeah, everything is based on a standard, not on a feeling as far as pay goes.
Tyler Martin: Very cool. That sounds like a good setup. So people are very clear where they can hit in terms of their own revenue goals. There’s that 12 o’clock alarm. Okay. I do want to wrap up anyway. Sorry that we’ve gone to the top of the hour.
Tyler Martin: I’d love to just wrap up and saying, you know, one, I think you’re awesome. I love what you guys stand for. I love your story. It’s clear you’re driven and you’re trying to find people and you’ve done a good job definitely so far
Tyler Martin: to find people that are like you. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I think it’s been a great conversation for people to see a different angle of how a company’s being run.
Treasure Boston: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s always fun to jump on these, hear somebody else’s perspective and any help that I can give to anybody. We’ve all taken our heads on the chin. If it can help anybody else out, feel free to contact me.
Treasure Boston: We’re all here to learn and grow together. And like I said earlier, collaboration is the highest form of currency. I’d love to get to know other HVAC owners. And I know there’s a lot of things that I can learn from other people too.
Treasure Boston: So thanks for having me.
Tyler Martin: I’ll put in the show notes. But if people did want to reach out to you, what websites do you want them to go to? Or what are the best places to do that?
Treasure Boston: Yeah, you can find me on Instagram at treasure underscore Boston.
Tyler Martin: Okay.
Treasure Boston: Or feel free to shoot me an email at treasure, T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E at clines, C-L-I-N-E-S-A-C, like airconditioning.com.
Tyler Martin: Okay, cool. So I’ll put those in the show notes. And then comfortsystemsofmontana.com is your other website too. People kind of want to check that out.
Treasure Boston: Yep. Comfort Systems of MT.
Tyler Martin: Dot com.
Treasure Boston: Of MT.
Tyler Martin: Oh, I’m sorry. I had it written out. Of MT.
Treasure Boston: I’ll be sure to put that. I think I told you mom too. Anyway. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it. Don’t want you to miss your workout. You got to work with the team at noon. I think you said it was at noon.
Treasure Boston: So I hope you enjoy your workout and thanks for being here.
Tyler Martin: Awesome. Thanks, Tyler.
Treasure Boston: Here’s what I want from every owner listening to take from this. Treasure didn’t grow from 1.2 million to 4 million because she worked harder than everyone else. She grew it because she sequenced things. She fixed the call intake, raised the standards, hired carefully, then built a second location.
Treasure Boston: Most owners run all four levers at once and wonder why cash gets tight and quality slips. The CFO question isn’t, can we grow? It’s, can we grow without breaking what already works? Sequence beats chaos. And the operators who survived their growth year are the ones who knew which standard to hold when everything else was moving.
Treasure Boston: Thanks again for listening. I’ll see you next week.
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- The Real Reason Home Service Companies Run Out of Cash – Stephanie Allen
- Scaling a Family Trade Business Without Losing the Culture – Chris Mazzini
- The $3M to $6M Growth Trap for Home Service Businesses – Janeen Norquist
- Nobody Talks About This in Home Services – Ashley Stroud
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: HVAC accounting help from a fractional CFO for HVAC contractors.
