Greg McAfee – Why Execution Matters More Than Ideas

remember my dad saying at the time you know, have Cadillac taste on a Volkswagen pocketbook.

So I thought at the time I either have to change my taste or change my pocketbook.

So I decided to change my pocketbook.

Like I said, 2008, when everybody was down, we grew 46 % I bought these big buttons that everybody had to wear and it said, don't participate in the recession.

And we just kept chugging along and we did not hunker down.

We did not...

lay off, we hired, we bought new trucks, we just just excelled.

46 %

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show where we inspire and encourage the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have

been there, done that, and are still getting it done.

Building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands, and their hustle.

I'm your host, Erick Loden.

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Today I'm really excited to have Greg McAfee joining us.

Greg started McAfee Heating, Air and Plumbing and ran that business for many years before recently selling in an incredible exit.

has also founded and manages Platinum RV storage.

Greg is a husband, a father, and a Christian.

So Greg, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me on.

I appreciate it.

Great.

Well, we will dive right in.

We start every show getting to know a little bit about you.

So can you tell us a little bit about your life growing up?

What was childhood like?

Childhood, we were basically a blue collar family.

My dad worked at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which was in Akron, Ohio, which was at one time called the rubber capital of the world.

They had Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, and a couple others.

And my grandfather retired from there, so my dad did what his dad did, and then I actually went to work.

for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company when I was 19 for a while.

But before that, I grew up, had, uh back in the day, I had a paper route.

I actually delivered papers seven days a week and I worked a vegetable route where we actually used to carry baskets of vegetables door to door and you got paid so much per

basket.

So I constantly worked since I was probably 12 years old.

had all through high school I worked and played sports.

when I grew up in a blue collar and my parents, they didn't manage their money extremely well, meaning they didn't save much.

But we always had a home, we always had food on the table, we always had clothes on our back.

But I remember I had a little bit, I had two brothers and I had a little bit higher taste.

than most people in my family.

And I remember my dad saying at the time when Volkswagen was extremely cheap and Cadillac was extremely expensive, my dad would say, you know, have Cadillac taste on a Volkswagen

pocketbook.

So I thought at the time I either have to change my taste or change my pocketbook.

So I decided to change my pocketbook.

Now, I didn't always manage my money well.

I made a lot of money as I was...

in my early 20s.

I actually, let me back up a little bit, I actually went into the, I worked at Firestone for a few years and realized I didn't want to do that the rest of my life.

So I told my dad, said we were working together in the same warehouse because they moved to Dayton, Ohio and that's where I went to work.

I was from north of Dayton, Ohio and I, a city called Mansfield, Ohio.

But my dad said, if you want in, I can get you in.

We're transferring to Dayton.

Well, I'd never heard of Dayton, but I said, I'm in.

So it paid good.

I was 19 years old.

was the first of, first 15 of 100 people going to be hired.

And I went to work there and I worked hard, broke records, loading, unloading tires, all those types of things.

But I decided I just didn't want to do that the rest of my life.

So I joined the Marine Corps and I went in and served.

in the Marine Corps and when I was in the Marine Corps I took a random course for extra credit in refrigeration of all things and I liked it.

So when I got out I was still in the reserves Firestone held my job so I went back to work at Firestone and I took heating and air at night and I got my one-year certificate in

heating and air took a 50 % pay cut which is good for when I speak at high schools

and trade schools, it's good for people to hear this.

You don't always start out at the top.

So I took a 50 % pay cut, went to work in heating and air.

Within the first year, basically he let me go.

He said, you'll never make it as a mechanic.

I was devastated.

Like I said, I took a 50 % pay cut.

went to heating and air school.

Now I'm fired.

But he was right.

because I was an average technician, but I had better ideas on how to grow his business and he didn't quite listen to me.

So I went to work for another company.

They put me in as a technician, trained me better, and about a year later, they actually laid me off and they went under.

He wasn't managing his business well at all.

So in 1990, which has been 35 years ago,

I started 36 now, but I've started, I got married and bought a home and started McAfee heating all the same year.

And yeah, so I'll stop there and you can ask me some more questions, but that kind of, that's the fast track to getting into heating in it.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, with going to work for Firestone at 19, the heating and air conditioning technical school, I'm assuming there is no formal college education in there.

Is that correct?

No, Marine Corps, I took the easy way out, joined the Marine Corps, but no college, just trade school.

And never took a business course in my life.

Wasn't from a family of money, as I said.

Was in Dayton, Ohio, so had no name recognition when I started.

And really did not have enough heating and air experience.

If I was coaching people today, which I do,

I would tell them get a little bit more experience before you go out on your own, but it seemed to work okay.

Yeah, yeah, clearly you've wound up in a good spot, you made do with what you had.

What was it you did in the Marine Corps?

I was in communications.

Basically, I was a grunt and carried a radio on my back.

it's kind of a funny story because today I have my own podcast.

I speak a lot, teach a lot, and I didn't know I didn't do well in school.

I hated school.

It was boring to me like a lot of other people.

But

The problem was, you know, when you do that, you don't really study hard enough or learn enough in school.

And then later on, you have to pay for it to learn.

It was free then, and you didn't take advantage of it.

And then later, you've got to pay for classes.

I really had a very poor vocabulary.

And so I took a lot of vocabulary classes and English classes.

And I get asked often today, did you

did you major in communications?

I was like, yeah, in the Marine Corps.

I carried a radio.

you know, basically, if you use the word self-taught, I'm self-taught.

Great.

I actually spoke to a group of students yesterday and that was one of the things I told them was, right now in my life today, I spend an incredible amount of money on education

and I wish that I could go back to when I was being educated for free.

I did well in school.

I worked hard in school, but I did not leverage the opportunity that I had.

I did what I had to do to get through school and get the grade.

I did not see the incredible opportunity to gain that knowledge and I wish I would have done so.

So that's great.

So 1990, you start McAfee.

What were those early years like?

You said you're lacking in experience.

You'd worked for two leaders that maybe were not doing the best job running their business.

How do you get a start with that little experience and no business knowledge?

Well, I remember I would sit down and write what I wanted to do.

And a lot of things that I wrote each day was what I didn't want to do.

So I would go to work at these heating and air conditioning companies and I would figure out, I'm never going to do this if I have my own company.

And I am going to do this if I have my own company.

So I used to try to talk one of them into advertising a little bit more.

So we weren't so slow during the slower times anyway.

advertising doesn't work.

Well, it actually does.

And that's why Nike and Budweiser and everybody else advertises that they're number one to stay number one.

So I really got into learning more about branding and marketing and advertising.

But back to that, I would really write down what I don't want to do.

I don't want to be like this.

I to raise the bar.

This was my goal from day one.

I wanted to raise the bar in the heating and air industry.

I wanted to have things like this, clean trucks, no paperwork on the dashboard, organized system in the back of the truck.

wanted to be, I had uniforms from day one.

I wanted to be a more professional heating and air person.

even though I didn't even have a company yet.

But it worked.

It was a gradual for those listening that are having a slow start.

That's okay.

Slow is okay.

Actually, I teach slow growth.

There is nothing fast about my growth at all.

And now that I've learned 35 years later, fast growth will take you under, for most people, faster than lack of capital.

Because you're not ready for it yet.

You don't have the capital to put into it and you couldn't handle the growth today I mean people have problems hiring one peep person rather, you know and and so imagine trying to

hire ten at once so Fast growth isn't necessarily good now There's one percent out there that can really handle it and they do well with it and they take off especially those in

hotter climates who are very business savvy but

My philosophy is slow growth.

It's not a race.

It's a journey.

Keep doing what got us where we got to was taking care of people better than anyone else and doing things others weren't willing to do.

so from the beginning, what I learned was professional management.

I had a professional company.

I started hiring people and training them my way, a professional way.

We had to wear uniforms.

We had to keep them tucked in.

You had to wear a belt.

Now some of this stuff came from the Marine Corps, but also it raised the bar in our industry.

I had vinyl lettering, which is common today.

Now you got the wraps and all that stuff.

But back then, sometimes it was painted, a logo was painted on.

It wasn't even straight.

It didn't even look good.

Trucks were dirty.

It was very unorganized.

It was unstructured.

And I took my little world of Dayton,

Ohio, and as we grew, people were like, well, if McAfee's doing it, we better do it.

And that's basically how it got to a huge way of doing that.

From shoe protectors, we were the first one in our market to wear shoe protectors.

I even did a TV commercial on it.

It exploded.

Now guess what everybody else had to do?

They had to go out and buy shoe protectors because they weren't allowed in people's homes without them.

But that's an example of how we raised the bar in the industry.

Then I started teaching, coaching, holding boot camps.

I'd like to say I changed a little bit of the industry nationwide because people would come from all over for a two-day business boot camp to Dayton, Ohio.

If you come to Dayton, Ohio in October, you're not coming there.

for the excitement.

You're coming there to learn business.

And they would take ideas back with them.

So it's very important to me to run a professional managed business.

And we started off at a kitchen table.

We built a garage behind our house.

But if you walked into that garage, it was the cleanest office you would have thought you were anywhere.

And then, you know,

Ten times that later, and my last building was 30,000 square foot, it looked like a medical facility when you walked through the front door.

It was just clean and professional.

And I always said, if customers come through my door, they know we keep our office clean.

They know we're going to keep their home clean.

And we did.

We always tried to leave the area around the furnace cleaner than what we found it.

And like I said, I joke about it today when I say it must have worked.

Well, it worked extremely well, because we were number one for 10 years in our market.

And I can explain to you how we measured that and got to number one.

But when you hear me say it must have worked, it's kind of a smart, eloquent remark that it definitely worked.

That's incredible.

uh sounds like you run a tight ship and it sounds like it'd be a great place to work.

can you tell us the process of building that business?

I know you finished your career with a uh massive thriving business, but you mentioned you went from the kitchen table to a 30,000 square foot warehouse.

What were the major steps along the way?

Kind of, you know, how did things start and when did they really start to escalate?

Yeah, first couple years, uh first year, year and a half, was by myself and I made hundreds of phone calls back then.

It was mostly landline and we actually had what was called a crisscross directory.

It was a big, thick blue book and it had everybody's landline in it according to your street.

So I could just start on one street and go down and call every house.

And I did.

Like on Tuesdays and Thursdays I made phone calls and Wednesdays, Monday and Wednesdays I went outdoor and knocked on doors and I knocked on both residential and shopping centers.

I just go shopping centers and knock on doors and say, do you guys need anything done with your heating and air?

I mean, believe it or not, a lot of people said, well, yeah, if

you could change my filters for me.

I mean, that was a job.

Yeah

or if my belts are making a noise and I'd replace belts or whatever.

But it was, you know, for the phone calls, I had to make 100 phone calls to get one schedule.

And my wife was very patient.

She worked outside the home then for the first three or probably three years or so in business.

But I would have sticky notes up on our cupboards.

Today we laugh and say that was the first that was the invention of the D board because of the schedule but so we would have sticky notes on the cupboard if she'd come home and

there were more sticky notes that meant there was more work so she never complained and she was a great partner all the way through in business and I'll get back to your your

question here in a minute, but it's very important for guys to know if you don't have if you don't have the support from home

your business is probably going to fail.

So you've got to be on the same team and you've got to have good support because there is a lot of balance in a business with family and business and if you neglect one, one will

go under.

If you neglect the other, it will go under.

So either you lose your family or you lose your business.

So it's very important to balance properly and you can't give more time to one than the other if you want a successful business.

I just, I did whatever it took for the first couple years.

I hired my first employee somewhere around in year two.

He knew nothing about heating and air.

I trained him.

He stayed with me over 10 years.

A lot of the things we did all the way for 35 years, we adopted from him.

He was extremely meticulous.

We started pre-bending copper line sets, tubing and all that stuff from him.

I would invest in the

vendors and he would do it.

Stuff like that stuck all the way through my company.

I'm always about new ideas and doing things better than anyone else.

So I trained him and then we got into like year two or three.

Year three, started having a lot of phone calls and I don't know what a lot means back then, maybe five, for air duct cleaning.

And I thought, man, I'm getting more phone calls for air duct cleaning than I am heating and air.

So I found an air duct cleaning truck.

I refurbished it.

And we did, we started doing air duct cleaning.

It was perfect timing.

There were only two other companies doing it and they weren't doing it right.

And within the first two years of air duct cleaning, we had two trucks on the road, four guys, two per truck.

And it just took off and we killed it all the way.

And we still do it today.

And so.

That was an added service.

You've got to be open.

You've got to be open to things and you've got to figure it out because if you don't figure it out, somebody else will.

And I've always been, I've always been open to that and I've always been, I don't care who comes up with the idea.

And I pay people for ideas, you know, if it's a good one and it sticks.

So we constantly were coming up with things nobody else was thinking of.

And,

Along the way, probably one of the biggest things we ever did, we called it the 8 to 8 same great rate.

And we came out with this in 2003.

And at the time, we were doing $3.5 million.

And when we came out with 8 to 8 at the same great rate, we skipped $4 million and went to like $5.4 in one year.

So 8 to 8 was the greatest thing I ever did.

And that means that

From eight to eight, we charged the same rate.

We didn't charge overtime.

Monday through Friday.

So eight o'clock's typically the most coveted time for people to want.

That way they can get their system serviced or fixed and then they can get to work.

Well, it became between five and eight was the most coveted because now I can get home.

I don't have to rush.

And you can.

work or fix on, you know, service my system after hours at the same great rate.

And it just took off.

And we took more market share over the next five years.

Believe it or not, nobody came up, nobody came out with anything, nobody tried to compete with it.

I guess they didn't think it would work, you know, like everything else that's very successful.

And we killed it.

And that was just one of the things we did differently than any other heating and air conditioning company.

not just in our market, but nationally.

again, thinking outside the box, what does your customer want?

I was actually in a class in an entrepreneurial center, they asked the question, what could you do for your customer that no one else is doing?

And when it got to me, and I was the only heating and air guy out of about 75 companies, I just turned it around.

I said, what do you guys want from your heating and air company?

residential heating and air conditioning company.

And it was unanimous.

We want after our service.

And they didn't even say at the same great rate.

We came up with that.

We just added it.

But the eight to eight same great rate stuck.

It was catchy.

You're the eight to eight guy, you know?

And I would have people come up to me in restaurants and you know, you're the eight to eight guy.

I became known as the eight to eight guy.

And because I did a lot of advertising and I was in a lot of the ads back then.

And this is the funny, the funny one was this guy came up to me and got a husband and wife and they had a little baby.

And they said, we nicknamed our baby eight to eight.

And I go, what?

And they said, yeah, he sleeps from eight to eight.

I mean, it was just funny.

what, you know, whatever sticks, whatever people can remember, whatever they want, you figure out a way to give it to them.

Yeah.

So long story short, nothing, I will say

this, nothing came easy for me.

Nothing was handed to me.

Nobody gave me a dollar and said, here, put it in your account.

I'll help you grow.

Nothing, a lot of things we tried failed.

We tried chimney cleaning.

That was a big failure.

I bought a window company thinking I could turn it into uh

home improvement with heating and air that failed.

We tried a lot of different things.

We tried carpet cleaning.

That actually did pretty well.

I just, couldn't compete with the big boys and my emphasis was more on heating and air.

So didn't want to take away from that.

So we sold that.

But, you know, if you don't try things, you'll never know.

And if you don't fail, you'll never know.

Failure to me is just

You know what Thomas Edison said about, you know, it's just another way to figure out how to make a light bulb.

And he failed hundreds of times making a light bulb, if not thousands.

So failure doesn't bother someone who's a go-getter.

It's just, there's got to be another way.

so we put a lot of emphasis on heating and air conditioning, trying to be the best heating and air conditioning company.

For many years, we lost money.

We didn't make money.

I personally invested everything I made profit wise when we started making profits back into the company for growth.

So I took a very small salary and I invested everything back in and probably about year 15 we kind of started having a milestone if you want to call it of we started winning a lot

of awards.

which got our name out there more even though we were advertised.

I've always spent somewhere between

On average, 6 to 8 % of gross revenue on advertising and marketing.

So was 6 to 8 no matter how much we did.

It didn't change.

what we did well was I always had an advertising plan that we would come up with by November for the next year.

I it was done by November.

Started working on it September, October, and by November it was done and ready to go.

And it was an all year plan.

off the cuff where a lot of guys sit around and maybe we should advertise.

No, it's too late if you're thinking that.

You should already have advertised or you should have already had your media bought and ready to put out to market by then.

And that's what we did.

We scheduled it January through December.

So we had a plan.

know, that's again, that goes back to professional management.

I don't know if it's

If that was a god thing for me or a Marine Corps thing, know, be ready at all times.

Readiness is very important for me.

Or just a knack, a gift.

But I was doing things that most people couldn't conceive and they were much smarter than me.

They were much better at heating and air than me.

And many times they had much better people and

better buildings and all that stuff than me.

But I don't know if people, they just don't take the time to think.

I've read over 1200 books today.

I've read some really good books on John Maxwell talks about thinking for a change.

And I've read almost every book John wrote.

got to meet him several times and read his first book, Think on These Things.

So,

I would go away and I do this here today.

mean, I have a time where I just look out my window and think.

We avoid that sometimes because thinking can be strenuous and thinking is very important in business.

Yeah.

I'll pause for a minute.

man, that's good stuff.

Man, I could listen to you talk all day, I think, but you've clearly been through some things, you've been through some ups and downs.

What was the most difficult step in building your business?

A lot of times it was waiting because nobody likes to wait and I'm very impatient and I will see other companies coming in and they had newer trucks.

By the way, I started with $274 and a used truck with no air conditioning.

So I would see other companies coming in.

They go out and get loans for new trucks and all this fancy stuff.

I'd see him going down the road and I'd pass him and I'd like, man, what am I doing wrong?

And I tell people all the time today, you're not doing anything wrong.

I wasn't doing anything wrong.

just, it wasn't a matter of if I was going to succeed, it was a matter of when I was going to succeed.

It just takes time.

And as you nurture it, I talked about in a podcast the other day about the bamboo tree.

You you've got to water it, nurture it, fertilize it for five years before anything comes up from the ground.

Because everything's going down the first five years to build a strong root system so it can withhold the 80-foot tree that's about to blossom in five months after the fifth year,

which is crazy.

But that's a business.

That's a business.

When you have a strong foundation and you build a strong foundation,

then it's ready for your growth when you're ready to grow.

And so the toughest thing for me was waiting.

The toughest thing also for me was probably hiring.

know, nobody really takes a hiring class.

Even those who go to college to have a business, they don't take a hiring class.

They don't know how to hire.

And

So people would come in and apply for a job and they were aggressive or they were motivated rather not aggressive.

They and if they were in the Marine Corps I'd hire them.

Well most of the time that was not a good hire.

So you know you've probably heard this but I teach hire slow you know fire faster because we keep people too long and we hire them too fast.

and we don't know how to train them properly.

So, you know, if you ask a lot of people what's your biggest challenge, they'll say people.

But people's not the challenge.

It's you managing people that is the challenge.

And we don't take time to understand that concept and learn how to hire properly, which we did at the end.

And I can give

your audience a little bit of a few tips on hiring which has really helped us.

Yeah, that's great.

And then training.

mean training, once you get the right person hired, training them is the key.

A lot of companies will hire someone, they've got a little bit of experience and they'll throw them in a truck in two days and say go.

Well then they wonder why their culture's all screwed up.

Because they just took someone from another culture and

I always explain culture real quickly like Thanksgiving dinner.

If you have a spouse or a significant other and you go to their Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas, it's going to be totally different than how you do your family's Thanksgiving

or Christmas.

That's called culture.

You're not going to go into theirs and go, let's do it the way we do it because that's their culture.

That's what they're used to.

That's what they're comfortable with.

That's what they like.

Companies have the same kind of culture.

So you're mixing culture when you do that, and it's not healthy for a business at all.

So that's why a lot of times we'd rather hire someone that has zero experience so we can train them in our culture than to bring another culture in and try to retrain.

culture in from another company and they're not used to showing up on time and they're not used to doing this right and they're not used to doing that or tucking their shirts in or

wearing a belt and wearing work boots and if you wear a hat it's got to be a company hat.

If you're going to unbutton your shirt more than one button you better have a t-shirt on and all those types of little things that we did.

Yet it was a very tight ship but believe it or not people enjoy the guardrails of professionalism once they get used to it.

If you don't and you just throw someone in a truck, then don't be disappointed because they're going to do things exactly the way they were taught and the culture of the last

company they worked for or sometimes the last culture of the two or three companies they worked for and then you've got a mess because it takes a long time.

It takes years to form the culture you want and it can be destroyed in half that time.

Yeah.

And you know what you know whose fault it is?

It's the the owners fault.

It's the president's fault.

It's the it's the manager's fault.

Whoever Typically, I say it's the leaders fault and You allowed it you got in a hurry.

You wanted to put someone in a truck to make more money and run calls and all that stuff Besides not even understanding how they run calls, you know, I mean when just to give you

an idea when we hire someone at McAfee with experience

It was somewhere around 60 to 90 days before they were actually, we'd give them a truck to drive home, but it was 60 to 90 days before they were running calls on their own.

Because we wanted them to see from maybe the top five technicians how we do things.

So we're going to put them with the top five and let them work with them for 60 to 90 days before we say go.

And then all the five have to agree they're ready.

Hmm.

Because a lot of people, just because they have experience doesn't mean they're ready for your company.

Now some companies will say, I just can't do that.

We need them now.

Well, you take a chance.

I mean, 97 % of companies today go out of business in the first 10 years.

So if you want to be the 97 out of 100, then go ahead and take a chance.

But I'd rather wait and make sure they're extremely ready.

And you know, not only that, even if they have an ego and even if they're some of the best technicians, they appreciate that.

They appreciate being trained because then they know what's expected from them.

And that's a whole other class.

Leaders don't give expectations enough, so employees and team members have no idea what's expected.

When they know what's expected, they perform better.

If they don't know what's expected of them, they just think they do.

If you want to retain people, make sure you let them know your expectations.

You should be interviewed during an interview process too.

I've told people all the time, now I haven't interviewed in years, but I used to tell people, if they don't ask me two or three questions at the end, I'm not hiring them.

A key question should be, how do I excel here and how do I succeed here?

When they ask those kind of questions, they're hired because they're asking the right kind of questions.

So 15th year, we started excelling.

We started winning all kinds of awards, integrity awards, best places to work, best contractor to work for nationally, all those kind of awards over the next

15, 16th, 17th year, our name got out there.

were growing faster than we ever had.

Like I said, 2008, when everybody was down, we grew 46 % because I bought these big buttons that everybody had to wear and it said, don't participate in the recession.

And we just kept chugging along and we did not hunker down.

We did not...

lay off, we hired, we bought new trucks, we just just excelled.

46 %

and the average company in 2008 was somewhere between a negative five and a five percent growth and that's it and we were up 46%.

So I knew then you know that we got something here and if you just continue to think differently and give people what they want you'll continue to grow in a very healthy way.

good stuff well um...

yeah i know it in our company when i was running it i always said i'd way rather hire someone without experience and train to do them my way than hire somebody with experience

and have to fix all their bad habits so uh...

i can relate to that but it sounds like that you really have your hiring dialed in i'm guessing that was earned through uh...

you know hard-lived experiences uh...

if someone

identifies an issue of culture in their business and they have not set those expectations have hired too quickly and kind of the trains already on the tracks and rolling do you

have any advice for someone trying to correct that culture and bring it back I think if you're starting from scratch it's maybe a little bit easier to set that culture you want

but how do you correct it when it's gone off the rails

Well, it starts at the interview process.

For the most part, in our market, there were over 500 heating and air conditioning companies.

We didn't start plumbing till the last year in this when I owned McAfee over the last year.

So it was strictly heating and air conditioning, air duct cleaning, and then we had a full-blown sheet metal shop where everything was custom fabrication.

So it starts at the interview process.

And this is what a lot of people don't understand.

So, when you have 500 heating and air conditioning companies, you realize that probably 20 % or less have brick and mortar.

They're more of established companies.

So, you know who they are in your market and you know who you compete against.

So, if they came from those companies, typically you should know as an owner or as a manager in a company interviewing, you should know a little bit about that company.

So I ask questions like, tell me more about how you did this.

Tell me what happened when you did this.

What time were you supposed to arrive at the job?

I mean, I'm gathering information.

I'm not correcting anything or anything like that.

I'm gathering information.

So if it does come down to we actually hire these people, then we would say, hey, if you remember at the interview process, you told me this.

Is it going to be a problem for you if we tweak that a little bit and we say,

You have to arrive promptly at 8 o'clock for a service call.

And you don't go to the door until 1 minute till.

Or you have to wear shoe protectors because you've never worn them before.

typically, I mean, it's a high bar.

But if you're number one, you want high quality players.

You're not going to pick, you know.

You're not going to pick low-ball players here.

You want high-caliber players.

So, and again, every culture is different.

I won an award once and I was on the panel with other award winners and the one company said, you couldn't work for our company.

And I said, why not?

And she said, we don't allow facial hair.

I said, well, that's cool because it's your company and I don't have to work for it.

But if it works for you, that's fine.

You know, it worked well for them.

They were bigger than us.

But that was their culture.

That's what they did.

That's up to them.

You don't have to work for them, uh

So every culture is different, but that's what we will do during the interview process because let's face it, most people interview someone once, maybe twice, and that's it.

And a lot of times people get hired because you need someone so bad the first round.

And that's about the worst thing you could possibly do most of the time.

There's occasions where that works, but it's rare.

So our interview process would go something like this, and I think it's changed a little bit.

So, but my interview process would go something like this.

So, manager A would interview and then he or she would rate that person.

If they were really good, they might go get someone right at that time and bring them in and say, hey, I just want you to meet this person for five minutes and let's see what you

think before we go to round two.

So, but round two would be another day.

And depending on

the caliber of the person we realized we, you in our industry you got to get someone hired because they're going to go somewhere fast.

But if they wanted to work for the number one company, they also will stick around a little bit longer through the process.

So then number two come in with a different manager and maybe a key or lead technician along with that manager.

So now we get two or three people opinion.

And then the third one, by the time we got to the third one, and nobody shares any information before the interview because we don't want, I don't want to distract you on

thinking I really want to hire this person.

I just want you to tell me what you think.

So by the time the third one came along, then we would meet together the three people, the four people, the five people, whatever it was.

And we would say, what did you like?

What did you dislike?

And if the pros outweighed the cons,

then we would make them an offer.

But before we made them an offer, then we would go to them and say, like I said, know, hey, here's what we're going to expect.

I don't want any surprises.

I tell people all the time, I hate surprises.

here's what we're going to expect, here's what you will probably need to change because we're not going to do it that way at all, here's what we can work with but would you be

okay if we showed you a different way?" And most people go, yeah, I want to know the best way.

Okay.

And, you know, do you have a problem doing this, this, and this?

And if they go no, then we'll make them an offer.

And now lately, and this will help

your entire audience who's hiring younger people and younger people means 18 to 22 maybe 23.

A lot of

people I get questions all the time.

gets bigger the older I get.

Yeah, exactly.

For me, it could be 40 year old.

I don't know.

But everybody, I get a lot of questions on how did you hire 18 year olds right out of high school?

Because we did.

We eventually put together a complete training program with a complete training lab that had probably 10 to 12 operating systems in it with a complete training in school lab.

desks and training inside, inside, external, internal.

And anyway, we had all that.

So we could hire someone.

We partnered with a HVAC college.

So they did all the accreditation work and we did all the training.

So, but anyway, so we hire an 18 year old.

training for people that weren't uh prospective employees?

You did training for other people at the college or only for your own employees?

It was 90 % our own, but a lot of times other colleges, if they would lose an instructor or something like that, we would help them and put the class, whole class, maybe 15, 20

people through their last quarter to get them graduated or something like that.

But we didn't bring in a lot of people outside of that.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty cool.

This was for in-house company employees.

It was one of the best.

It was one of the best labs for training because we had multiple things going on from cutting holes in a roof to put a vent in to measuring duct work to we had like 10

thermostats on the wall operating so we could program them set it up.

know of course the troubleshooting furnaces, air conditioning, heat pumps, all that stuff.

disassembling a motor, putting it back together, all those types of cool things.

So it was pretty cool.

But what we did with the young people, here's what we learned.

How are they gonna stick?

Because the statistics show that hiring an 18-year-old, they're less likely to last a whole year.

That's just a fact.

And there's many reasons to that.

It could be the company problem, it could be management.

could be the individual.

So how do you hire and get a 18-19 year old to stick?

Well we found when you hire, when you ask questions like tell us about some responsibilities you had growing up.

Did you have to make your bed?

Let me really ask that question.

If you've had to make your bed and you have a side job during high school and you've had chores either around your house or in the neighborhood, you just were more likely to stick

and be more of a success at our company.

And so we would sit down and we would brainstorm better questions

for that purpose.

And it just got better and better and better.

role play, role play by the way is extremely critical with technicians, sales, installers, office staff, your role play, your role play, your role play, your role play.

If you're a professional sport, if you're playing a professional sport, you better believe you're gonna practice, practice, practice, practice.

You don't go out,

Game day and and be the best you've already practiced all that you've gotten good at it and practice.

So why don't we practice in business?

I Mean we did and we did a lot until people were sick of it I paid people to come in new people new faces to roleplay with us Because I wanted their perspective.

How did that how did that affect you when he asked you that question?

What did he how did what did you you think?

Did you want him in your house?

Because if we can get good at it in role playing, and we can make mistakes after mistakes after mistakes in role playing, then when it's live and we're in the home because we did

95 % residential, we're going to be fine-tuned, crisp, clean, sharp, ready to answer the question.

Eye-to-eye contact, not looking down, good handshakes, all those types of things, ask good questions, all those types of things.

It's called practice.

It's called role playing.

And my whole company did that, and we did it quite often, especially within certain departments like sales.

So, you know, those types of things differentiate you from everyone else.

The new employees coming on, they don't know any different, but the older ones coming on, they do.

And again, some of them stick, some of them don't.

I can tell you from interviewing many, many people over the years, you heard the old saying, it's harder to teach an old dog new tricks, and there are new tricks.

Business changes annually.

mean, business changes as fast as my cell phone changes.

Nobody knows that some companies are still doing business the way their dad did the way their grandpa did they wonder why they're not growing You got to change you got to adapt

and you got to figure it out that your job is an owner You figure it out take classes hire a coach.

I told someone the other day.

I said I probably had I figured it up.

I probably had 15 coaches from 1992 to 2024 and

I had four boards of advisors with three people on the board.

They had a contract for two year contracts.

For many years I had a board of advisors.

These people were not affiliated with Heating and Air.

They were business gurus in many different areas and they advised me.

I had four meetings a year, four hour meetings.

We had an agenda.

I was ready to rock.

I paid them anywhere.

It started off like $500 a meeting to $2,000 a meeting.

And I'm a sponge on how to improve this.

I would pay people to, we do focus groups.

I pay people to come in and watch our new commercials.

When I brought like six people in to watch a new commercial we did and they cried, I knew it was a home run because when you touch hearts,

with children and feelings and when you're touching hearts, you're going change people and they're going to want to do business with you and they're going to like no other.

And it's crazy.

And didn't do it for that reason.

I had no idea people would cry.

it's just cool stuff.

But if I brought the focus group in, paid people to come in.

and say, sit down for an hour.

We want to talk to you about our strategy here and show you a couple of new commercials we developed, which we called Super Bowl commercials because we were actually on the Super

Bowl in our area three times.

So they were Super Bowl material, and they were high quality.

And we paid for it.

Now, we didn't pay millions, but we paid hundreds of thousands.

And it was just a well-

worth investment.

If you're going to be the best, you better look the best.

You better fit, you know, you wear the best of what you do and people think of you as the best.

And that's what I wanted to be known for.

So I was willing to think outside the box and do things that nobody was doing in heating and air until we did them.

And that's another story.

I used to get

aggravated people copying off of us until I realized

at least they're doing it right now you know at least they're more professional I can't help it they can't think for themselves but anyway you know it's just a lot of fun I found

that fun

copying me than me trying to chase them.

Yeah!

it's no wonder you built such a successful company just listen in to you you've got me fired up i want to start a new business just to implement some of these ideas you've got

around hiring and training and and we we hired a lot of young people as well and my biggest threat was the girlfriend it we'd hire an eighteen-year-old they'd fit our culture

we get them trained they'd be doing great and then they'd get a new girlfriend that wanted to move

Yeah.

A lot of times, by the way, we would bring in the girlfriend or the wife during the final interview process to make sure they were on board.

We are a seasonal emergency business.

Is it going to be a problem for your spouse to work overtime?

Because if it is, we need to know now because we do work overtime.

mean, again, you're setting expectations.

A lot of the spouses would say that had been with us a long time, they would say, you know, I'll never forget you bringing me in.

That really helped me understand why you did what you did.

And it's not, it wasn't a perfect place to work by any means.

And I'm far from a perfect owner manager president, but I tried to just think outside the box.

And I did learn that

When people know their expectations, no matter where they sit or what seat on the bus they're in, whether they're a spouse of an employee or an employee or in the office or in

the field, when you know your expectations, you'll perform at a higher level and you won't be disappointed and you won't have any surprises.

Because if there are surprises, then we drop the ball.

Man, that is...

I tell the business owners, it's not a secret what you do.

Let people know.

I let people know when we're making money.

I let people know when we're losing money.

And it wasn't a secret.

I never really put, I never really shared how much.

I think there's some things that are confidential, but if we made money, I also was able to share through bonuses when we did make money.

But when we didn't make money, guess what?

There wasn't a bonus.

So you gotta have skin in the game.

You'll

get it if it's there, and if it's not, we need to smarter and figure out how to make more money so we can all make bonuses.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff.

know that was a key part of how I ran my business as well was performance based pay structures.

And man, we win as a team, we lose as a team.

You know, I'm the owner, I take the biggest risk.

Everybody needs to have a base pay structure that covers their bills, takes care their families.

But if you help me win, you're going to win.

And if we're not winning as a team, things are going to be tight.

Yeah.

you got to make it.

got to make it.

It's McAfee.

We ran a tight ship, but you got to have some fun.

You know, we were constantly having some cool stuff going on from volunteering.

We supported our community.

I say hugely.

Children and families, we supported our community from day one.

I supported Little League teams first year in business, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew and grew.

And so we did a lot of support.

of charity and together.

They volunteered.

We did a truck or treat event for the last 10 years where our parking lot was a quarter mile track basically around the building and we would have truck or treat.

Other companies, a couple of heating and air, but very few.

Mostly, you know, other companies would come in.

and they would decorate their trucks and their selves for Halloween and give out candy or have games for kids.

And we had 3,000 4,000 people in our parking lot on our property for four hours.

Very safe Saturday during the day.

A lot of police officers, support FOP, all those types of things.

It was a very safe place for children to come and have fun and get candy.

and it was community effort and a couple years we'd have 90 % of our employees volunteering and we did we purchased Christmas gifts for children who would not have

Christmas without us just some cool stuff and

And then we have chili cook-offs and cookouts.

We deliver to the field guys food.

Just did a lot of stuff for fun.

So you gotta make it fun.

You can be serious.

You gotta have a profitable business to stay in business, but you can also have a lot of fun.

That's great.

That's some really good stuff.

Like I you got me all fired up and ready to go here.

So was, was there something that significantly delayed your growth?

And if so, how would you handle it differently if you had to do it over again?

Well, I guess the main thing for me, I'm very energetic, very motivated, and very outspoken.

That's good and bad.

So in 2020, said something.

know, 2020 was a very sensitive time in America for many different reasons.

And I said something on my personal Facebook.

very sensitive, very insensitive during a sensitive time.

I like to word it that way.

And I could have said that today and probably got a little bit of backlash.

I could have said it 10 years ago and got zero backlash, but saying it during that time of 2020, it went viral and I got attacked personally, business-wise and everything else.

Hmm.

I recovered well.

Within the next four years, we grew 88%.

That year, 2020, I took a hit.

Lost some customers, lost some employees.

didn't lose my confidence but boy it knocked the wind out of me because it was one of those things where if you wouldn't have opened your mouth Greg you wouldn't be in this

situation.

I also, there was a few employees that came back and there were quite a few customers that came back after they realized, wow, I the next big thing after me was bigger than me.

But anyway, if you ask me what would I do differently, I'd probably lay low on exactly how I think.

And even though what I said ended up

I don't know.

I use the word 90 % but probably 90 % true.

Even though it's true, you don't have to say everything.

Just lay low.

You're a business person.

You know, you can't be too political and you can't say everything you think as a business person because the limelight's on you and your customers think differently than you and I

found that out the hard way.

And so that was the biggest thing in my career that definitely moved my cheese that I wish I would have done differently or not done.

But the rest, I mean, I just come from a different kind of background, the way I was raised.

Failure does not stop me.

I was told that I couldn't do this, that I couldn't start a business.

I was told I didn't have enough education.

I was told...

that I would fail and that just motivates me.

don't, know, anything like that, any failure, wipe it off, get up, wipe yourself off, get up, let's keep going.

And that's just what I did every time we failed.

And I had many things go wrong in business.

We were building our first building, all the framing was up.

and I was over there like chalking off my office because I was going to bring some family over and show them what my office was going to be.

I left to go home and eat lunch and I got a phone call and they said, your business collapsed.

Your building collapsed.

I don't know what it did and I was just there.

They go, yeah, it collapsed and it did.

It just collapsed.

They didn't have enough supports on the wall.

Fortunately, I wasn't in it.

It already had four walls of block.

and everything collapsed, so we had to start all over.

You know, it was devastating for a minute, but we kept going and it got built and, you know, it probably delayed us, you know, a month or so.

But there's just a lot of things.

If you don't expect anything to go wrong, you're going to be very disappointed because if you're an overachiever, if you're trying to make things happen, if you're trying to

provide jobs,

put food on many tables, things are gonna happen.

They're not always gonna go right.

And how you react to how they go will determine your success in the next five years or the next three years or the next 10 years.

So you just need to be prepared.

And nobody is at first, because you're like, my gosh.

I I started air duct cleaning and I was sued.

from one of the other two companies for using the term air duct cleaning because their company name was Air Duct Cleaning Company.

I mean, that would be like suing someone for using heating and air conditioning.

So I was devastated.

was a young company.

I didn't have squat.

And here are this big attorneys writing me letters.

And suing, this guy's suing me for using the term air duct cleaning.

So.

I got with my attorney who I didn't even have an attorney at the time.

got with a friend's attorney and he said, I got a quick fix for this.

Can you put the name McAfee behind the air duct cleaning?

Yeah, I think I can do that.

And I did.

And he registered the name McAfee air duct cleaning and would solve the problem.

So it wasn't that big of a problem.

But scared me to death, right?

I never been sued in my life.

Here's I'm just a young businessman trying to

provide jobs and make a living and I get sued.

So expect it.

Just expect, expect people to not like you, expect people, meaning, I'm not talking about like customers, I'm talking about people in general.

When you start succeeding for some reason it's human nature, you've probably stolen or did something wrong to make your money.

If you just expect that, you won't be disappointed.

because I've been attacked in that way too that it's sad that the people that won't get up and go out and try are the ones who attack people who do.

But if you get used to that, it's just part of life and you can believe all the wealth, the top 100 wealthiest people in the world are attacked the most.

So you gotta have

broad shoulders and you've got to be prepared for negativity and still take care of people and still smile and still do what you're called to do because I believe being a business

owner is a calling.

I believe I couldn't have done what I did without it being a calling and not having the experience I really quote needed to be in business.

So it was a calling for me and I took it very serious and I took paying people very serious, paying as much as I could competitively, paying my taxes.

If someone came in and bought a $10 filter, it went in the pot and we paid taxes on that.

There wasn't any side work, there wasn't any cash jobs.

It was extremely run professionally, professional management.

I got audited by the Department of Labor because one of my employees turned me in for, they said I charged them lunch when they didn't take lunch.

So those are things you run into.

And they typically go back two years, but they couldn't find anything in two years.

So they went back three years.

And I had to pay a fine.

I think it was $60,000.

Well, that's a lot of money.

But they even told me, typically, we get a $150,000 fine because we find all kinds of stuff.

Well, they couldn't find enough.

Meaning, you know.

You were taking lunches, so we just automatically took your 30 minutes for lunch because we found out you were taking lunches and not writing it down.

But anyway, they didn't like that.

So people will turn on you, and that's OK.

You still have to take care of the other, the rest of your flock who do appreciate you.

And remember, you're providing jobs, and you're putting food on a lot of tables.

Yeah, they're working hard and they're working for you, but you're providing jobs and you're putting food on a lot of table and there's a lot of responsibility and lot of

liability for doing it.

And don't be ashamed to make money and profit is not a bad word.

that that's a mouthful there's a there's a lot there yeah yeah I don't know what I have to add to that that everything you just said you nailed it there's a lot there is there

something you kind of brought in a few things there but when things get really hard when you're feeling attacked when you're dealing with

you know people turning their back on you getting reported when you're not doing anything wrong doing everything above board in the best you can what is it inside you that gives

you the motivation to just keep grinding it out and keep pushing instead of giving up

Well, first of all, a lot of prayer.

You you mentioned at the beginning, I'm a Christian.

got, I became a Christian two years before I started my company and got married.

And so prayer is the key.

It definitely helps me.

I have good family support.

I've got a strong, my wife, my children who are adult children now, I've got good family support.

But there's also just something that you're just kind of made with.

A lot of entrepreneurs have it.

And there's a toughness about not quitting.

You just can't quit.

And the more people tell you that you'll fail, the stronger you become.

Or the more obstacles you have to go through, the stronger you become.

And when you realize, because I study successful people.

So I just did a podcast called The Big Three where I did Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

And I wanted to know how their first five years of business went.

So that's what I talked about for 30 minutes.

And they all had obstacles.

They all had, nobody was handed, they weren't born with a silver spoon.

Bill Gates was the closest, but his first business failed horribly.

And then he started Microsoft.

Jeff Bezos, he left a good job to start Amazon and he told his mom and dad, know, if you loan me money, there's only a 70 % chance I won't pay you back.

They loaned him like 350,000.

They're worth 30 billion today from that investment in Amazon.

But he was working with a door, an interior door, over two pieces of wood.

That was his desk.

And then you got Steve Jobs.

I mean, sold his Volkswagen van for 1,500.

And then his partner sold his Hewlett Packard calculator back then for $600.

So they started with $2,100.

And yeah, that could have been worth maybe $5,000 today.

But they started with nothing.

These guys started with nothing.

They had tenacity.

were, doors were shut in their face.

They were told that you can't sell books online.

And the biggest bookstore in the United States sued Amazon because they didn't like that.

We didn't think of it first.

They had a lot of obstacles.

You ask, do I get through that?

I always say there's no S on my chest.

If there was, it would stand for struggler.

There's just a tenacity and a never give up attitude where you're just going to plow through and get it done.

and regardless, I say McAfee, there's blood, sweat and tears spread all through that 35 years.

But I kept going.

I was hoping the...

the positive part of it would override the blood, sweat, and tears.

And there were some exciting times.

There were some celebrations.

When you grow 88 % in three years, when you're at the top of your game, there's profit.

Where you go, I never dreamed I would take this much money out of my business.

There's profit.

That's why I say profit is a good thing.

I invested it for years back in the business and still if you're an S corporation you're paying taxes on it right and you're investing your money right back in the company so it

would grow because you didn't want to fail and you were willing to live on less and you told your family we're only going to take two and three day weekends for the next five

years we're not going on a long vacation and they were okay with that and they supported you.

So later on, you know, I get emotional here because I love family, but then you take care of them later.

Thanks.

You know, we got to go out to eat after the sale of my business and we got to go out to a really nice place and rented this really private room in this really nice place.

And I wrote, I took my key leadership team and my family and I wrote a page about each one of them individually and read it as my eyes were sweating the entire time and got through

it.

because I appreciated all of them, especially my family, dealing with what they had to deal with for years in order for us to get to the place which is today.

And it paid off extremely well.

Plus, what I didn't mention real quick,

So 2020, I get attacked.

2021, I'm starting to have, I'm taking care of two elderly parents and I start having cold chest pains in my right upper shoulder.

Everything I Googled was stress.

It would dissipate, go away.

I go, I worked almost every Saturday unless we were out of town.

It got to be full Saturdays and then eventually I was out of there by noon, but I love going in on Saturdays.

It's a time to think and...

a less stress.

And I go in on a Saturday and I go to lift my hands to type and I couldn't lift my hands.

So I called my wife real quick and I said, I'm going to the emergency room because something's really wrong.

Well, sure enough, I mean, the first two tests they did, I got in the emergency room fast, first two tests were negative.

If they would have sent me home then I'd be dead.

because the third test showed my heart enzymes were elevated and I was either having a heart attack or already had one, which led to the heart exam of my widow maker was plugged

99%.

My right coronary was 99 % plugged and three other ones were like 90 % plugged.

So I had a quintuple bypass that next morning.

I go, everything went well through the surgery.

go home.

My wife was all ready to help me mend.

She came down with COVID, but not only COVID, COVID pneumonia.

This was 20, November of 21.

And she was in hospital 19 days.

She almost died.

I actually, my recovery of a quintuple bypass,

I was able to sneak into the hospital a couple times because of a doctor friend who said, need to get her on ivermectin, which was illegal.

Within three days, the black circles around her eyes started clearing up and she came home and for the most part, she's doing extremely well, but it really affected her.

But she was almost dead.

So my kids almost lost both parents within 30 days.

What makes you think differently right there?

So when people not attack, but when they question, why would you sell your business to private equity?

I say that's a terrible question to ask certain people because you don't know their circumstances.

You don't know their kids do not want to come into the business and that they're doing their own gig and they're very happy doing their own gig and they don't want to work in my

company.

or you don't know that there's health reasons and that it's a perfect opportunity for you to get out of your business.

So before people attack someone for selling to private equity, they need to know just a little bit about them.

And actually it's really none of their business anyway, because it's not their business.

So it cracks me up how many people are so interested or consumed

of how you sell your business.

But anyway, it was perfect time.

I'm glad we're okay, but that does make you rethink everything because if you've ever been in heating and air, it's 24-7, 365, emergency business.

You're never done.

You're never off.

No matter who you are in the business, it is just nonstop.

It's a great business.

We had fun.

We served thousands of people, tried to do it better than anyone else.

We made really good money doing it, know, probably especially the last 10 years.

And it was the American dream, but it was also time to sell.

I was ready.

I was done.

I went out at the perfect time and I had all my ducks in a row running a tight ship.

Our numbers were to the tee.

you know, five months of due diligence, they really couldn't find anything and we, you know, we got, had one of the highest multiples and we had a very strong EBITDA.

So put those two together and you walk away feeling very confident in what you built and pretty excited for the family because the next stage, like I said, I'm sitting here at

platinum RV storage facility which we built from scratch on 32 acres of farmland.

We're only in phase one.

We've got 90 units under roof and it's gonna one day it's going to be the largest indoor climate controlled RV storage slash boat motorcycle custom car in the United States.

So we're excited about that.

It's just another goal to hit.

without all the stress, as many people to run it needed.

But it's called refiring and not retiring because I still need a place to go every day and I still need a challenge and I built that fortunately before I even sold McPhee.

So, just say we've been blessed.

It was good timing.

And I'm looking forward to the refirement over the next couple years, which means, what are you going to do with that, Greg?

Well, you know, I really am into family, generational wealth, family, trust, all those types of things, which we're going to be able to do.

And we've had a foundation, the McAfee Foundation for Children and Youth since 2006.

So we just get to help more children and families.

So I'm excited where we're going.

that's awesome and with you running it i have no doubt that platinum rv will be the biggest company in the country probably sooner than anybody expects some uh...

i'm excited to see where that goes away you do with it that's cool well i had that on my list of questions a little later but uh...

the you don't need to be a little bit so can we talk a little bit more about your exit uh...

you know you mentioned you had a really healthy even uh...

and uh...

high multiple uh...

what details are you comfortable sharing about your exit in that process and and just walking through that

Well, you don't know what you don't know.

I even know I have really good friends that have sold their companies much bigger than us, much bigger than ours, more zeros.

And they did extremely well for themselves.

But nobody can explain just what that due diligence looks like or what it feels like.

mean, how much can someone really, how deep can they go?

Well, they can go pretty deep.

And typically, a private equity company, they might have 10, 12, 15 attorneys on your company only, your case per se.

And they dig in deep with everything.

They dig in all the financials, all the legal, the environmental.

They dig in.

And you, they dig in on you, your background, everything like that.

How much risk?

am I taking buying this company?

And if you were writing a check for that big, you would want to do the same thing.

It's just that they've done it more and they know how to do it.

So the due diligence part, I recommend highly.

You have to have a team to help you and as a business owner, especially me with my personality, I probably take things more personal.

It's my baby.

I started it from scratch.

What do mean you're questioning me?

I just didn't need to be part of that.

I needed someone else to filter all through that, which I did.

had an operations manager and accounting manager, and they did all the filtering and all the questions.

I very rarely had to get involved, which was a good thing.

It wasn't that I couldn't do it.

I just took things too personal because it was mine.

And sometimes you need someone to manage that purchase that is separate from any emotions.

And it'll go a lot better for you.

And honestly, they're just looking for answers.

Yes, no.

Tell me why.

That's all they're looking for.

Once they get that, they move on.

But you've got to be prepared to sell before you sell.

Because I did a podcast the other day.

87 % of businesses will not sell because they're not ready to sell.

They're not sellable.

They're not buyable.

They're just not ready.

They're not profitable.

They're not in order.

And I told a story about a guy that started the same year I did and came to me and

wanted out.

just, I mean, it's really sad.

He just wanted a hundred thousand dollars.

Just get me out.

All he had was one truck left.

He didn't have a customer base.

I'm like, Steve, I'd love to help you, but you don't have anything worth a hundred thousand.

And it's sad because, you know, what I built, he had the opportunity to build the same thing.

He was actually much smarter than me as far as heating and air goes.

And but it just wasn't important to him.

He made money and he spent money and it came down to needing money and he just wanted out.

I couldn't find any reason why I could give him that much.

But anyway, you've got to be ready to sell and you've got to build your company either if my kids wanted to take over because they both worked in my company many, many years.

Especially my son.

I mean he started when he was five years old and he worked, you know, probably he's 31 and he probably worked 23 years out of 31.

He worked almost in every area and But he realized that's not his calling.

He's a year away from getting his PhD in leadership now, but he realized that's not his calling and

Yeah, and he's married now with two kids and he is so glad that he didn't.

And I never once made him, I never once made him feel guilty that, you know, I built this for you.

You should come in here.

That was not my intention at all.

If they wanted to come in, if my daughter wanted to come, she's in nursing, if they wanted to come in, then we would have figured out how to accommodate that.

But when they said,

We have no interest.

Don't be upset.

My son told me in eighth grade, are you gonna be upset if I don't come in the business?

And no, what do you wanna do?

it is what it is.

So you have to figure out as an owner, are you transferring it to the family?

Are you gonna leave it?

I hate the word leave, because you don't leave a business.

It's a baby.

You don't leave a baby with someone.

trust them to manage that baby.

Are you going to sell it?

Are you going to sell it to another company?

Are you going to sell it to private equity?

I mean, honestly, very few companies would, very few heating and air conditioning companies would pay me what I got for my business.

If they did, everybody'd be calling on those companies to buy businesses.

Do I agree with everything private equity does?

No, not at all.

And some of it really sucks.

And some of it sucks for a company that I built for 35 years and done some really cool things that they're no longer doing.

But I had to come to reality and say, it's not my business anymore.

You know, I did what I could do and I'll be held accountable for what I did when I owned it.

I don't own it anymore and I can't control that.

So I'm not going to worry about it.

But yeah, are some negatives to anything you do.

No matter who you sell it to, nobody's going to do what you did exactly anyway.

So you just have to decide.

And when you're getting ready to sell, number one, it's got to be ready to sell.

And there's books on this.

You can hire coaches on this, how to sell your business.

If I had it to do over again, I probably would have prepared another six months.

first sale because I think now knowing what I know I probably could have done a few cool things to make it worth a couple more million per se.

mean a million is a million bucks right?

And it would be worth waiting six months for but I came out well and I did some cool things and

But I can help other people.

Hey, if you think about doing this or this, that it'll probably be worth more.

So I enjoy doing that.

And there's other guys that do the same thing.

But if you've run a good business, then you need to run it good all the way through the end.

In other words, you need to be ready to sell or transfer it.

to someone else.

But you don't want to just, even if you're transferring it, if I was transferring it to my kids, I wouldn't say, OK, here you go.

See you later.

It would take a lot of coaching, and it would take still being maybe on the board or a consultant or always there to say, here's what I would do, to consider.

So there's nothing easy about starting a business.

There's nothing easy about running a business.

And there's nothing easy about exiting.

for business.

Amen.

I can relate to all of that.

And yeah, I had a lot of those same experiences in our process.

I know I didn't have a whole financial team handling due diligence.

I did a lot of it myself.

And I remember getting frustrated one day talking to the it was a P firm that I actually ended up not selling to.

But I was talking to their accountant.

And like you said, they just kept digging and digging and digging and digging.

And I said, what?

Do you think I've been paying more taxes than I was supposed to for the last few years?

Like you guys are the ones that came to me with an offer.

I wasn't soliciting it.

And you think I've been paying extra taxes on purpose?

Like it is what it is and here it is, but man, they dug in.

They dug through everything.

So.

Yeah, it's deep, for sure.

And I think you nailed it earlier getting through that process, starting with the extreme professionalism, doing things right, paying all your taxes, recording all your income,

running clean books.

That's the start of all of that.

That can make a big difference between a sellable business and one that's not, is just making sure you're doing stuff the right way and with integrity.

Yeah, I didn't mention this, but I had a sister-in-law who set me up on bookkeeping the first year.

And that really got, that kept us in order, because I went from her, she managed my books for probably seven years, and she had a full-time accounting job, so until it got just too

much.

And then she turned me over to an accountant.

and then I went from a CPA and then I went from an individual CPA and then I went from a CPA to a CPA firm and then along the way we built our own accounting department where I

had an account manager.

So our books were, you know, they balanced to the penny every month.

I was blessed to have, I took care her as well after I sold the business for getting me started strongly.

my bookkeeping because that's the key.

So many guys you know as I coach them I'll say when's the last time you got a financial statement and if it's January you know some of them say I think I hate that I think August

how do you know where you are oh my so that's very important I mean we had a goal that we were gonna have the books completed by the 10th

of the month.

So January 10th we would have, you know, December's wrapped up and uh we stuck with that and you sometimes it was the 12th or the 15th and but when we were going through that due

diligence they would ask for all kinds of things and they would say things like just give it to us within two weeks and we would have it to them within two days because we already

had it.

All we had to do is find it.

When you're that organized, and it's not me, because I couldn't do bookkeeping today if I had to.

It was my team.

When you hire strong team members and you tell them your expectations.

Now, I can balance a checkbook, but I couldn't balance the books.

But I could tell them I wanted my books done by the 10th.

And that's my expectation.

And that's what happened.

business is pretty cool.

It's a structure.

And it's fun.

But you have to have a plan.

You have to have a goal.

And your goals aren't just about making money.

Your goal is about structuring a business where the byproduct of all that structure equates to money.

But it's not just about making money.

If you're going to chase money, you're going be chasing it the rest of your life.

Everything we did was structured to, of course, produce a profit.

Our pricing, I mean,

If you've ever heard of Ken Goodrich, you know, he's the guru in heating and air.

He's out of Las Vegas.

He sold Gettle for a lot of money.

Gettle Air.

I had him review my books.

Probably.

Eight years ago, we were talking one day and he said, hey, just let me take a look at your books and I'll tell you what you're doing wrong.

And I thought, you know what?

I have nothing to lose here.

And he had been reading my articles for years, followed me a little bit.

he sent me an email like a day later.

He goes, I'll tell you your main problem.

What?

Your prices are too low.

I go, look Ken, you're in Las Vegas.

I'm a date in Ohio.

You're going to tell me how to price my jobs.

He was 100 % correct as we raised our prices.

We didn't miss a beat.

We actually sold more.

People expected us to be higher and we kept bumping and bumping and bumping them higher and higher.

And when you do that, it just goes to the bottom line.

You're not changing anything else.

When you raise your prices, you're

You're directing that to the bottom line.

That was an eye-opener.

Our sales team, at first they were scared, and then they bought into it.

for about a year, every other month, we'd them up a little more, bump them up a little more.

But nothing changed.

We kept selling more and more and more.

And then we looked at our parts, our service department.

We'd bump it, we'd bump it, we'd bump it.

So eight years ago, we started becoming a much more profitable business.

But we do all these things.

That's an easy way to jumpstart your profit right there, raise your prices.

But all these other things we do creates the atmosphere to produce profit.

You know, in other words, you can't produce profit if you don't have a system.

Here's a quick system we have.

We start promptly at 8.

We want to be done with a full replacement retrofit installation, including humidifiers, air cleaners, smarts, thermostats, and maybe an ionizer or whatever it is.

We want to be out of there in eight to nine hours.

done and that's with custom duct work around the furnace you know the the takeoff and the return and our goal was eight to nine hours and for the most part we'd hit that some some

jobs of course going into problems would be 10 or 11 hours but for the most part that's what we hit and that that was the expectation so when you have your jobs priced right and

you're getting done in eight to nine hours with two guys per job

very profitable but without that system we would not have been as profitable because remember if you don't set the expectations then you're relying on your team to maybe the

team said I don't even think we should be doing this in one day I think it should take a day and a half well what's that cost to go back again it's like I

recall that's a huge amount to go back again so we want to be done

a half really cost you two days because they don't get another half a job done and the other yeah oh man it's snowballs you go from super profitable to losing money off of the

smallest little thing that nobody thinks matters yep

Boom.

And when I first came in the industry, that was norm, two day for an install.

And one company who had been around forever was a three day install.

I'm like, what in the world?

So when we first came in, I mean, we started doing a two day and I got it down to a day and a half.

And I go, why can't we do this in one day?

We figured it out.

And then when we started our sheet metal shop, I've always been,

custom fabrication around the furnace.

So everything's been custom made.

When the sheet metal shop called me and said, look, I'm not interested in growing anymore.

You're going to have to figure it out because I can't grow.

can't do any more jobs for you at that pace.

Hmm.

That blew my mind.

But I said, well, we either have to buy it.

We have to buy a company.

We have to find another company.

We have to start our own.

So I've always been good at organically startup.

And that's what I did.

I went out and bought some used machinery.

I found a fabricator.

We started our own.

And at the end, for the last seven or eight years, we were under one roof with everything, our fab shop, everything.

But when you own your own fab shop, you control how fast they make sheet metal.

So if I'm tearing out the job and I have it tore out by 9 a.m.,

and we measure and I have the measurements called in by 930, well then I need the sheet metal delivered by 11.

Okay, that's my expectation because if we can get it together by 11 and it's all together by one, then now you're looking at putting all of it together, all that stuff, and we're

out of there by four o'clock.

So, that again, as a business owner, when people call me and go, how do you get your guys to do that?

I'm like, question.

Wrong question.

It's not how do I get my guys to do that?

It's setting the pace at the initial interview This is what we do.

This is how we do it and this is the expectation Are you good with that?

yeah, I get it.

get it Well, you know if you surprise them six months into it and say hey, you know, I want you to do this now That's not gonna go well.

So it's preparation

Setting systems in place, procedures, here's how to do it.

I'm going to make it easy for you because I'm going to buy you every tool that makes your job easier because I can spend a lot of money in tools and save a lot of money and time.

Time mostly costs more than tools nowadays.

So anyway, I think you're getting the drift but

For the guys that can't figure out how to make their- I hate that word make- make their guys do that.

I'm not sure maybe you maybe you should be an owner Maybe you should just go work for someone because it's not making anyone do anything.

It's explaining what your expectations are It's explain.

It's explaining that I also pay bonuses if we make if we do this amount, know that you're I want you I want you to have skin in the game I want you to make and be profitable

yourself.

So if you do these things and you get good at it, by the way, it becomes a habit

You know, mean, guys have told me before, I would never go back the way I was doing it when I first got here.

You know, the other company I learned from, I'd never go back to that way because it became a habit.

And they liked the look and they liked the time it took to do that.

And they just got used to it, towards clockwork.

In general, people like to win.

And you build systems that produce winners.

People like to be on a winning team.

Yeah, and by the way, we had multiple meetings, not for meeting sake, but we had company at the end, and we've had company meetings since the garage days.

I'd meet with three or four people in my garage and we'd discuss the week.

But we'd have company meetings, mandatory, four times a year, every quarter, Saturday mornings.

I'd uh cater in full breakfast from eight to noon.

and we'd have company meetings and they would be extremely high energy fun.

Updates here's where we're going.

Here's what we're doing.

Here's what we're not doing anymore.

Here's what's happening needs some volunteers And then I had one hour called TWG time with Greg one hour and we were out of there before noon and everybody was Honest now did

everybody like it?

No, I Didn't ask them if they liked it I just said this is what we're gonna do now you could miss one meeting a year if you had a vacation scheduled or something happened, of

course, but

Brother 3, you better be there.

And it was very informative and it kept everybody on the same page.

Again, I get people calling me asking me, what do you talk about during a company meeting?

Wait a minute, you're the owner and you're asking me what you're going to talk about?

Seriously?

What should you be talking about?

So I start from scratch and I say, what are some things you'd want your employees to know?

Well, I'd like for them to know this.

Write it down.

This is a great time to tell them.

Well, I'd like for them to do this instead of this.

Write it down.

This is a great time to tell them.

Is it easier to tell them at a calm atmosphere with breakfast and fun?

Or when you're upset they didn't do something and you call them in your office?

It doesn't go well.

So company meetings are critical to the success of a company.

And you ask any successful company they will tell you they have company meetings.

Now some companies are so big they can't get everybody in the same room.

So they have multiple groups.

but they still have meetings.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff.

So now you're a little ways away from the exit of your business.

Do you ever look back and second guess or regret that decision?

Is there any hesitation at all or was that the right decision?

I will say this, which I'm going to write a book on it one day.

Doing something for 35 years, day in, day out, loving what you do, 98 % of those 35 years.

And you just up and leave within a six month period.

I went through a moping period, I call it, and I could not put my finger on it.

I was

I won't say depressed, I was down.

I had like lost.

myself.

I had no idea that would happen.

I was excited, but I would wake up down and I'm not like that at all.

If I get down, I'm down for a day or two and we're back at it.

But it was a moping period and three months, two weeks, I interviewed 10 different people who sold their business and retired.

I read books about transitioning.

I read, I just was, I had to figure out how am I going to get through this because I can't live the rest of my life like this.

This is miserable.

In three months, two weeks, I snapped out of it and everybody I interviewed said, yeah, I went through that.

Yeah.

And some were only three or four weeks.

Some were six months.

But they all said, yeah, I went through that moping period.

And uh one guy said, I would get up and get dressed to go in.

And he goes, didn't, he goes, I was a mess.

So once I realized, okay, I'm normal.

I just gotta work through this.

I'm gonna read stuff, how to work through this.

I got through this.

Did I ever regret I did, should have not done it?

No, oh no.

No, perfect timing.

Couldn't have been better.

Glad I did it.

Opportunity Glore.

Now I plan better than most.

When you start building another business before you even sell your own and then you get to transition right into your other you got somewhere to go the next day which I did.

Thank God because I don't know I probably would have been in that moping period much much longer if I wouldn't have had platinum to come to.

And my son's here every day.

He comes in here, he helps me with this.

He's been here longer than me.

You know, I guess I just call that a God thing.

It was just planned well.

But no regrets.

my gosh, no regrets.

I even, I'll say this, I went as far as...

Now do I miss some of the things?

Gosh, I miss having an assistant because I suck without an assistant.

I had an assistant for so long.

I can't keep up on, you know, I'm a, I call myself a very expensive check writer.

I'm writing checks here, like, I'm like, I don't do this.

You

Do I miss a lot of people in an office?

Yeah, I kind of miss that a little bit.

Do I miss some things?

Absolutely.

And had one person that was with me over 30 years.

Yeah, I miss that, but I don't miss or regret anything I did.

It was perfect timing.

Couldn't have been better.

Glad I did it when I did it.

Thank you.

And I'm looking forward to growing platinum.

That's that, you know, that keeps we're going to an RV show this weekend.

My son and I, you know, we got a booth just like I used to do in the early days of McAfee.

do a lot of home shows.

So, you know, it's just it's kind of a phase two.

But I.

I don't have to make a sale today.

I'm not going to not eat.

lot less pressure.

So a way better place to be doing it a second time.

still celebrate a sale.

I'll release a smaller place out here for $350 a month and I'm like, we sold one.

But I don't have to sell anything every day like I did at McAfee.

if we don't sell, we don't eat.

that's how I said that for years.

And I mean, we.

So, when I say you're putting food on tables,

There was many times we made payroll when we didn't have the money to make payroll.

And we always paid ourself last if there was any left.

And that was my wife and I sitting around a table writing checks like I do right here.

all that pressure is gone and I've been blessed financially.

That's why so many people hit the lottery and they're broke within seven years.

Fortunately, I've had some higher income, especially over the last 10 years, to kind of get used to that.

And

I'm not going out and blowing it.

I'm trying to make really good investments and be a good steward of God's property, of the money, of just what we're going to do over the next 10, 20 years.

Yeah, yeah, I a couple weeks after we closed on the sale of our business.

I had to go Renew the registration on my personal vehicle and I was like, well I haven't done this in over a decade.

I always just dropped it on my secretary's desk and let her take care of it So yeah life without an assistant

Yeah, it's true.

I mean you get used to something for many years.

I had an assistant for many many years and I'm just used to it.

How do you do that?

I you mean I gotta call them myself?

I gotta go run errands?

man.

So uh...

Where do you get them?

Yeah.

I'm sure that decision to sell, it sounds like you guys had some health stuff going on, a lot of considerations, but...

uh...

what were some of the things that maybe you wrestled through or had to consider as your wife and i or your wife and you made the decision to sell or not

Um, again, I'd say we prayed about it, but we talked a lot about it, about...

it's...

I'd say, I don't know, to put this nicely, because who knows who listens to this, but when my expectations that I've always had of working hard, working long hours, I mean it was

just part of who I am.

uh...

from day one i mean i'd i joke with people all times i only worked half days i just picked which twelve i worked uh...

because my dad worked hard i got my my hard work from my dad he just worked hard and i had to mix smart with i had to work hard and work smart but i just worked long hours because

we had to eat

And my wife's goal, by the way, was always to be a stay-home mom, even when she was little.

I want to be a stay-home mom.

So when we met, did graphic arts.

when we were expecting Travis, she quit because of the fumes around the graphic arts.

And she put her notice in.

And we did something cool then, because I was just really getting to understand finances.

lived on my salary for a while without hers.

We banked hers and we said if we could live on it for so long then you'll be ready to quit and we did.

So that gave us a little confidence to live without her salary because I was not drawing very much at all.

Believe me.

So we did that, we talked and said, you know, I'm going in on Saturdays myself and all the trucks are here and nobody's working, but we have jobs on the board and nobody wants to

work past four o'clock.

And I hear people are complaining about working past four o'clock.

My DNA, I just couldn't take it.

Because everything, and it's a great company today and there are great people that work there and I would recommend them highly.

Matter of fact, I'm building a new house and they're gonna be doing some of my work that I like running the line sets and pre-bending and all that stuff that I love.

They're doing that for me, my new house.

Of course I'm paying for it.

Yeah

But they're great people.

everything I said at the end, everything that I have done to get where I am, a large portion of the team no longer wants to do that.

I can't stay any longer because it's not going to go well.

I was getting an attitude.

It was making me sick.

So, you know, if they have, you know, this group that bought us have different ways.

I mean, they'll just double or triple the workforce and figure it out.

I wasn't going to do that.

that alone, it was time.

When I say it was time for my mental health and for my health, for stress-wise, I don't need another heart attack.

I've lost 100 pounds since my heart attack

without drugs or surgery.

Thank you.

Took me, I did it in one day under nine months.

And I got off all, I was on six medications for high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

I'm not on any today.

I take a water pill that actually helps with high blood pressure believe it or not just a water pill.

So anyway I don't need another heart attack and that's why when I I stay a lot it was just good timing and it was time for me to exit and I even went as far I owned the building

they releasing it back to me

I went by it.

I had to go in it a couple of times, especially when I was going through the moping period.

That was hard because things were changing and I'm in there and I'm like, it's making me more upset.

So it's kind of funny now, but I was going through a moping period.

Believe it or not, I do a whole story on bald eagles.

American bald eagles go through a moping period around the age of 40.

So that's why I call it the moping period.

If you Google that, you can read about it.

You know, I was going into building and I noticed changes and I noticed certain things like my American flag wasn't being changed as often as I like and some of the potted

plants weren't being changed as often as I like.

I don't need any stress.

So I said, I told my wife, let's do some numbers because if I sell the building for this amount,

I I think we can make as much right now as we do in 10 years leasing it.

And it came up pretty darn close.

So I said, why do we need that real estate?

Let's sell it.

And I use the word God send a lot, but it was just a God send.

The second person who looked at it made me an offer and wrote me a check for it.

We closed within 30 days.

uh So I've separated myself completely.

which is less stress for me and gave me a little bit more income.

We're building a new house so I said now we can do this, this, and this.

That I wasn't going to do yet and that's freedom and that's just nice and so it's been, it was a good ride and now I'm on another ride and I'm going to make it a better ride.

man, that's good to hear.

That's good to hear.

Is there a viewpoint or an opinion that you once held strongly and changed your mind about over your 30 plus year career?

I would change?

Is there a viewpoint or an opinion that you once held strongly and it has changed throughout your career?

I would say a couple things.

Today I teach business owners quit touching things.

We touch too many things.

We should be employed from the neck up.

And if you're not, you're touching too many things.

Meaning you should be thinking more and strategizing and setting goals with other key players.

But you should be employed from the neck up.

and I touched way too many things probably the first 15 years and probably micromanaged too much earlier on.

So when I teach slow growth I probably could have grew a little bit faster by putting better professional management systems in place earlier.

No regrets per se because everything worked out fine.

But that's some things I would have done differently that I thought was right.

I thought I was the best salesman in the world until I invested in a really good salesperson and even put them through a series of tests to match me, strengths,

weaknesses.

And they tripled my sales the first year.

bought him a brand new GMC Denali truck.

I actually gave him the one I had, which was like two years old, bought me a new one.

So, you know, we're our biggest problem.

Just doing things a little bit differently as an owner, I would have done differently.

I'd say, um...

I tried to, I was a member of mixed groups, you know, through the ACCA where you visit other companies and learn from them.

I did that really well.

I probably would done more of that.

You can't learn enough and you can't take enough ideas from other people.

So when I said I had 14 or 15 coaches, I did and I kept getting better coaches and better coaches and better coaches because I'd ring that sponge.

I'd wring it out of them, man.

I'd get everything I could out of them, then I'd get a better coach and more expensive coach.

I spent, you know, a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaches, but they helped me.

I have no ego when it comes to helping me.

And I'm blown away today by company business owners who will not invest in a good coach.

And

If you tell someone, I charge $5,000 a month, they're like, $5,000 a month?

They think that's high.

I just can't tell you what I paid for a good coach that took us, helped take us to the next level.

That nobody had hit yet.

That nobody, I mean, when you grow 46 % in 2008, that didn't just come from me.

That came from lot of strategy from other people that helped me and my board of advisors who challenged me.

I don't know what, know, a lot of people just want free advice, but you you kind of get what you pay for.

So, you know, I probably would have, I don't know, I don't know.

I also say this, say a lot, there's a lot of things I wouldn't do any different.

Because if I had done it differently, I might be in different place today and I don't know where I'd be.

I know where I ended up was what I call life accomplished and it's good.

doesn't mean I'm perfect.

Doesn't mean everything is perfect.

It just means I did a few things really good and right and I landed in a good place.

uh

So there's not a whole lot I would want to redo because I don't know what redoing or it would take me.

um But those are some things.

Touching too many things, micromanaging and selling on my own way too long.

You think you're the owner and that you could sell better than anybody.

I was good, but the team that I left, the team that I trained and met with almost every day,

We were closing close to 80%.

Wow, wow, that's pretty impressive.

it's very strong and we had and we role played and we had a lot of fun and we screened out a lot of the calls.

That means we didn't run every call that came in nor should you because if someone was getting more than a certain amount of estimates

We would ask them a few questions and if they were stuck on getting seven estimates, we'd say, you know what, go ahead and get your six or seven and if you really think you need

another one then, you know, give us a call because I don't want to be in that stack.

And if they weren't making a decision right away or anything like that, I mean, we screened the calls.

So the calls we ran were prime customers or candidates to close

a sale because I often said, I'll hire salespeople, I'll hire closers.

And we did it with no pressure.

We had, I think when I left we had 3,600 Google reviews.

Not one of those ever said McAfee pressured me to buy.

Not one.

We had fun selling, we had a technique and it was powerful and we celebrated every sale.

Because without a sale we don't eat and I don't care how big you get, you know you're feeding a lot of people and So we celebrated sales all the way to the end

Well, I know you're doing some coaching now.

You spoke there a lot about coaching.

How does someone find a quality coach?

How do you screen out that coach that's going to help you go to the next level?

versus, you know, it seems like everybody is in consulting and coaching nowadays.

And, I run into a lot of them that, aren't worth getting their free advice, much less paying for, how do you find a quality coach?

Well, first of all, you ask around and you find somebody that has used a that they recommend.

If you just Google one, I'll probably come up in the top 10 even today, but you need to interview the coach.

mean, don't ever hire anyone that hasn't done what you want them to do for you.

These coaches out there never ran a company.

These coaches are in groups, these big groups of coaching charging tens of thousands of dollars to coach that were managers of big businesses.

Most heating and air conditioning, plumbing, electrical, landscape, lawn care, roofing, are not huge businesses.

I average is like 10 people or 10 to 20 people.

So why do you want

a guy that managed you know a hundred people in a thousand person company coaching you in a small business.

I don't.

So I always stuck with

What have they done on their own?

What could they do for me?

That's one of my questions when I interviewed them.

Okay, I've went this far.

This is what we're doing.

We're not broken.

Now there are companies that I've coached that are completely broken that need fixed.

But I would tell people we're not broken.

I just want to get to the next level.

Are you able to do that for me?

You're not fixing anything.

If you come in here and try to fix things, I'm going to fire you because we're not broke.

So

get a recommendation, find out what kind of reviews they have, and have they been there, done that.

If they haven't been there, done that, that's first thing I say.

I'm not interested.

Gotcha.

That's some good advice.

Well, as we're getting here close to the end, my favorite question, you've mentioned that you are a person of faith, that you're a Christian.

How did that affect your leadership journey and the way that you ran your business?

Yeah, my perfect answer would be, my church answer would be, I thought through everything before I said it and I was a really nice guy.

But that's not the truth.

But what it did was, I read, this is actually right here, this is my leadership Bible I've had since like 95.

It's based on, there's so much in the Bible about leadership.

And I try to read that every day to get wisdom about business.

Because when you don't have a background in business, you've never worked as a business owner.

You never took a business class.

You need all the wisdom you can get about business that you can gather by reading, watching others, learning.

so, you know, I would pray for help.

God help me be a better leader.

Because leadership, everything falls on leaders, on leadership, as John Maxwell says.

And if you're not a good leader, you're not going to have good business.

You're not going to run a good business.

So first of all, you have to learn to lead or very small percentage or natural leaders.

But they're out there.

But a lot of them, you have to learn to lead.

You have to learn to lead better.

You've got to have some.

natural leadership to or initiative or drive to start a business of course.

But then you got to learn how to lead because you're going be hiring people and sometimes that's first time you've ever hired anyone in your life and then you've got to lead them

every day.

So I pray for wisdom in how to lead.

I pray for my team every day.

Help them.

There are family issues and hurts, pain, divorce, children issues that people go through every day.

got to be where people would text, my team would text me or meet with me and say, could you just pray for me?

I'm going through a rough time.

We're going through a divorce.

Or my son is on drugs or

My daughter ran away, or who knows?

I mean, multiple things.

So we even had a uh prayer request form online and people in our community would fill it out and it was all through the website so it would just come to me.

And we would pray for people's problems and challenges in life.

Everybody has a challenge in life.

And if you say you don't, you probably have more than others.

But it's not a crutch by any means.

People say Christianity is just a crutch.

No.

No, it's not.

It's strength.

It's power like no other.

Jesus talked more about finances in the Bible than any other parable.

And there's a lot of business information in the Bible of how to run a business, how to treat people.

And I prayed for work every day.

I mean, we pray for work again.

It goes back to putting food on tables.

I don't want my team to come in here too often and not have a job.

And if you're in the heating and air or plumbing, but you know installation wise that happens.

Just stay home today because we don't have any work for you.

Well that sucks after about two days.

You know what mean?

Do it one day and go, I get a day off.

But after two or three days, that's going to affect your paycheck.

Yeah.

So I prayed for work for everybody.

I prayed for families.

I try to pray a lot.

I rely on God.

I try to do this.

I rely more on God than myself.

That's good.

I rely on myself, it's probably not going to go well.

God gave me a gift to do certain things, but I can't do it by myself.

yeah amen amen lots good stuff or our last question we wrap up every interview to either fuel or settle the debate if you have a job to do and need a cordless tool which brands do

you prefer

I'm going to have to say Milwaukee.

I think that's probably, I can say 90 % all the time.

don't know, 75 % of our tools when I left were Milwaukee.

I figured the part of the country you're in and just the HVAC industry, was guessing that was going to be your answer.

Yeah, they hold up well.

They're powerful.

I think the batteries match about everything you buy with Milwaukee.

And, you know, so you don't have to be buying separate batteries all the time.

And we had less challenges.

And that's a good thing with employees.

We provided, they had to provide their hand tools, but we provided a lot of cool tools.

They had to be responsible for it.

But I won't go all into the depth of what that means.

we provided some cool, anything that would make the job go quicker and more efficient or neater.

If that would cut that line cleaner and look nicer, we might invest in it.

Or if we can get that meter,

that makes that more accurate, that refrigerant charge more accurate, we probably will.

Or if that thermostat shows us the meter gauge and it's more accurate, we'll probably buy that thermostat.

I was also a really stickler on, I'm a buy American type of guy.

And that's something that has changed as well, which really bothers me, but it's not mine anymore.

I tried to buy American products as much as I could.

All our furnaces and air conditioners were made in the USA and our A coils were assembled in the USA.

I couldn't control that.

A lot of the thermostats were made in the USA.

Our air cleaners made in the USA, humidifiers made in USA.

To the new group, they could care less.

So, but again, it's not my company anymore.

It's theirs.

Yeah, yeah.

Awesome.

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me and chat with all of our guests.

And you are still actively doing coaching and consulting, correct?

I And my son helps me.

We do some testing for people that kind of tells you your strengths in your business and who you need to hire and why you shouldn't be doing something.

So we mix that in with the coaching.

I don't do any technical coaching at all.

I haven't touched a furnace in 15, 20 years.

I do strictly how to grow your business, how to think differently, how to become number one.

how to systems in place, how to get your finances in a row, and how to just think differently than your competitors.

And that's worth, I mean, that's worth gold.

Like I said, you're paying for something that's going to pay off later.

You just don't know it yet.

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

And so if our listeners are interested in engaging with you, what's going to be the best way to reach out to you or get a hold of you?

Yeah, can, there's a couple different ways.

I have a GregMacAfee.com, G-R-E-G-M-C-A-F-E-E.com.

It's my Greg MacAfee website.

Getting ready to update it, but it's there.

And then if you look up Platinum RV Storage, it's our new business and there's a way to get ahold of me there as well.

But it's not hard to find me.

If you Google Greg McAfee, there's all kinds of business and HVAC stuff out there.

So it's fun and I love helping guys who are very interested in getting to the next level.

Awesome, awesome.

Well, we'll make sure we link both of those websites in the show notes.

And man, this has been incredible.

You got me fired up excited about leadership in a way I haven't been for a while.

So and I really appreciate your time.

I really appreciate your insight and your knowledge.

And this has just been wonderful and excellent time.

Thank you.

I appreciate it, Erick.

Thanks for having me

Yeah.

on.

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