Tyler Griffin:  I know it's hard. I tell people early on, look, you're wearing a lot of hats and you're not gonna love everything you do, but you can find fulfillment and joy in what you do if your purpose is big enough. And that's what we try to do. It's not fun going in attics that are a hundred plus degrees to replace an air handler plumbing cleaning out drains. It's not fun, but you can find joy and fulfillment. In taking care of that customer, five star service and solving their emergency situation, and that's why it's great to tie up to it.

‍Austin Gray: Welcome back to The OWNR OPS Podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray and this podcast we talk all about starting and growing local service-based businesses. We publish episodes every Friday. And send a newsletter with a recap every Saturday. If you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet, you can go to ownrops.com/newsletter. That's ownrops.com/newsletter. 

This week's guest is Tyler Griffin with Swift Pro Heating and Plumbing. Tyler started this from scratch and he's grown it to over 200 K in revenue per month. He did a creative strategy to work a deal with another local owner operator that he shares about in the episode. He's also got 194 Google Business reviews at the time of recording this episode. How did he do it so fast? Stick around and you'll find out.

I think it's such a good example to set for other people who are starting businesses want to professionalize their company. I don't know about you, but. When I took a shirt into either jeans or khakis and I show up to meet with a customer, it's a complete different feel when you're wearing a collared polo shirt. As opposed to showing up with raggedy jeans, untucked, the typical skull can ring in the back pocket like they're used to seeing with a contractor. 

Tyler Griffin: A hundred percent. Yeah. People expect more Now. We have uniforms for all our team members, pretty much from day one. Pretty early on we got uniforms and then at a new sales, it does take a little bit once they start to get 'em. So in the interim, I had a sales guy recently start, and on his first day I'm like, dude, you gotta. Stop on the way home and grab some polos, man. Yeah. You can't be showing up even to the office in a t-shirt. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. And at what point did you implement the collared shirt polo branded. You got the same, looks like you got the same one black collared shirt with the brand.

Tyler Griffin: For the, yeah, I've got these for like non-uniform wears. Actually our uniforms are that royal blue, which is one of our theme brand colors, and then just gray uniform pants. So we have that for all of them wear that, whether HVAC or plumbing. 

Austin Gray: Sweet Tyler Griffin, tell us about your business. So we're brand new in this area with this business.

Tyler Griffin: My backstory briefly, I grew up in Wisconsin actually. Thus you see the Cheesehead hat and the Packer sign behind me. So still a loyal cheesehead, but don't miss the winters, that's for sure. Grew up rural Wisconsin. People ask me, which part of the state are you from? And I'm like, the part where no people live.

I live moved out here in 2010. My wife and I, we had just our oldest at that time. He's 16 now. Time goes fast, but moved out for opportunities out here. Lived in Maryland for about seven years and then we've been in Virginia since 2017 when we relocated to Virginia. So built a sister company essentially to a brand in Maryland from the ground up starting in 2017 for six months, I drove back and forth from Baltimore to the Northern Virginia area, which was not fun. Everything from sleeping on the floor in my office, late nights to getting home at nine 30, leaving the next morning at five 30. It was some long days for about six months, and then I moved my family down here and life got a little bit easier.

But yeah, we had a good run building another company that was focused on exterior, so like roofing, siding, windows, and then we got into solar. And so I got to do a lot of team building, company building, building from essentially scratch of course with the team, with support. And so we had a good run there.

We sold in 22. I stayed on for the ride and exited about 14 months ago and then did a short sabbatical. Last couple years there we're a little bit rough, and so we did a short. Interim in between and then launched Swift Pro Soft launched September. We didn't really have real revenue numbers until about November 'cause we were building website and trying to get marketing figured out to get some leads and asking friends if we could come over and service their units.

So anyways, pivoted basically because I had a non-compete from the last company and so pivoted Industries didn't have a background in HVAC and plumbing, so it was brand new. But my run in solar the last several years there learning that. From the ground up and building a team there was what gave me the framework to take a leap into the unknown.

But I did have a good friend that had a background in HVAC and he's been part of the team since day one. And then we were able to recruit some others pretty quickly. So we have a lot of expertise on the team right away. But yeah, didn't personally have a background in it, so we're just about seven, eight months in right now. Like I say, basically since November though that we had real revenue numbers.

Austin Gray:  I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. I. And in both businesses I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in BearClaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the backend of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit go.get jobber.com/ownerops O-W-N-R-O-P-S. 

Austin Gray: Incredible. I can't wait to talk about the launch of this new business, and I wanna dive into that definitely on this podcast. But how much can you share about the past business?

Tyler Griffin:  I'll keep it general for now. Okay. It was a little bit of a painful ending and did shape my views on things, private equity and all of that. I didn't have a great experience and there was some others as well that didn't have the best experience, but I, we had a lot of challenges in our partnership.

Growth and success bring challenges of their own. And so we'd gotten to a place where I was running the Virginia side and other partners were focused more on Maryland and then solar started taking off and it was Tesla Solar was a big part of it. And that sort of naturally started melding things back together and we were trying to figure out roles and then made the decision.

One of the original founder wanted to, 'cause it was a 30 something year old business, but we had built Virginia from scratch. There was very little market presence in Virginia. So we had come together to build Virginia and I was the one that moved down and got to have the operational role in the trenches from day one.

Starting out, then I wasn't ready to do what I was now. I had a lot to learn and I knew that, so I did join some partners. I'd been really good at sales and really good at creating momentum, but I wasn't really great at making money and making a profit, and so I had purposely left another company that I was also successful in from the standpoint of sales, just not making a lot of money to join.

This company. And so I did get out of it what I needed to, and we had a lot of success. I was able to contribute my strengths, which were primarily at the time sales, and then learn the other parts of the business, both by learning from others and trial and error and several years to get some sustain.

Just a good team in place, I would say. And we had a share of ups and downs. But yeah, the. Sale in 22. It didn't end up the way I personally hoped. I think for others it's worked out better. Originally hoped for this amazing network of mentors and collaboration and all of that. And I think for some it is that, but there's a lot that goes along with it.

It's a pretty. Focused world and there's the parts of small business building that I love. I wouldn't say that it stays the same, so I'm a big private ownership family business guy. That's why like when we hit the reset button after being forced out in February of last. Year we took some time to clear our heads and figured out what do we really want?

What is our life mission? What's our purpose? We'd been very successful from a financial perspective, but when we were suddenly found ourselves reeling on the outside, looking in, trying to figure out, okay, what now, what next? And I considered a lot of things coaching, and I've got, I had a few opportunities, right?

Could have joined other companies as a sales leader, whatever. There was plenty of people that would've loved to work with me, acquisition. But in the end is, man, I wanna build again, and this time I wanna build it right. I wanna build it from the ground up and I'm gonna start from scratch, right with nothing. And that's what we chose to do. 

Austin Gray: What was the main learning lesson that you took away from that first run and that you're going to take into, I. Swift. 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah. Vision and values of where you're going matter. And I think that there can be a tendency to think that success will fix things. Let's just go make some money together. But if the foundation of what your life mission and goals are and the way you wanna lead the team, build the team, I. Aren't aligned. Like those problems are only gonna get bigger with success and money actually changes things. I think that there, in the back of my head, I just expected at some point it's like we're all making a lot of money should be good. But if anything, that just made it a lot tougher. I. I think that was one lesson for sure, and then just getting your personal mission, vision, values aligned, and then making sure that you're living that out in the business you built, because it's like you're gonna spend most of your time working, and especially as a business owner, it's gonna be life dominating.

So when it's not aligned, that leads. To fragmentation, right? You don't feel you're siloing, essentially trying to separate your personal and your business life. And it shouldn't be that way, man. You gotta be who you are all the time. And so I think when you start out trying to be something you are not, or trying to, let's meet halfway in compromise.

So I think in partnerships you gotta make sure that your rocks. Solid. So for me, I chose this time to not have any partners, not have any outside funding, and thankfully we're in a position to do that. And also it is a family owned business. We're 100% owners and we haven't taken anything from the outside.

Now, I have team members that certainly from an operational standpoint, get treated like partners. They give valuable input and they help shape the decisions that we make even on a daily basis. So it doesn't mean that I'm a believer in command and control. I just think from an equity and value standpoint, if you're gonna have partners, it's really critical that you get it right and you get the right people, or you gonna just create chaos and you end up having more stress from that than anything else. And building small business is tough enough, and especially the blue collar world. I live in a very ruthlessly competitive region, so it's like you can't add stress at the foundational level and expect that it's gonna be good long term. 

Austin Gray: What are some of the things that you've identified as part of your vision, the mission, the core values that you're going into this business with? 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, so couple of them, man. Two overriding big picture goals of where we want to go with this thing, man, is I wanna build the best blue collar business to work for in Northern Virginia. And that's a lofty goal. And we're nowhere close to that. There's plenty of great places to work here, and we're just starting out, right? We're nobody right now. But that is, that's like the driving North star, right? Like we want this to be a place where people love to work. And I think for the most part we have that from the standpoint of what we have in the.

Small team. We have fun working man, and we have a text chain that goes pretty much every day, all day, back and forth with, oh, look at this review or whatever. And it's including all the field team members. And we just try to celebrate wins and all that and collaborate on challenges. So that leads to the principle being people first, right? We're gonna take care of our people, we're gonna take care of our customers from the outside facing. Our goal at five years is to be the most loved. Trusted and recognized brand within five years in our space. Okay, just in our space and in our area, targeting just a few counties here in, in Northern Virginia.

Again, lofty gold. Will we do it? I don't know, but we're gonna give it everything we got. And again, I didn't say biggest, I didn't even say best. It's that customer loyalty. Like our goal is to turn every customer into a raving fan. So if you look at our reviews, a lot of them, it's not about just getting a review and a five star.

We have some of those, not everybody likes to say anything, but some of 'em will really elaborate on their experience and name names, and give pictures. And that's what we strive for. I have this slogan go for, wow. We don't wanna just. Do the bare minimum. We wanna exceed expectations, not just meet them. And so we're still working on as, as again, a baby company. We're still working on improving all our processes on a daily basis to be able to do that, but that is what we're striving for every day. 

Austin Gray: Thank you for sharing that. I want to get tactical here. So you are launching a new business. I'm making an assumption that you came in with. Some capital and probably a good amount to fund this. There's a million different things to do whenever you're launching a business, but I'm curious to dive into tactical steps for our listeners. For somebody who has previous experience, who is coming off of an exit and who is coming into a new launch, what are the most important things that you're doing in the early days? And take us back from, okay, you have this idea to start this. Let's start with the industry. Why HVAC plumbing? 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah. Even though it's ruthlessly competitive in our area, there's a ton of private equity money flooding the space, and certain lead sources are really difficult. That might work in other areas don't work here. At least for a startup. I. I still believe so strongly in what we do. HVAC and plumbing. Every house has it. Every business has it. It's foundational to the way and long term. I'm very passionate about the trades, like I made this choice very intentional. 'cause going back to being a kid at 13 years old, we bought a barn and turned it into a house and that's when my love of the trades started.

I just love the process of transformation, improving something. In this case, we get to improve the quality of life through heating, cooling. We love it when, like this last winter, I had a guy, please look, I'm home with sick kids. Our furnace went out. Nobody's answering. Another company's coming Monday. I don't know what to do.

And we made calls. There was some snow and cold, and we got a supplier to send in one of their guys to open up the back and find the part we needed. We sourced it, we drove it out to the job, and we fixed it all within a matter of hours on a Saturday morning. That kind of stuff, man, just passionate about it.

Just really love having people's back and believe in that. If there's always room, I think for. A new company if you're putting your people first and putting your customer first. 'cause I just think mission drift is real and it's so hard. Once you're successful, you start focusing on the dollar signs and you gotta make money to take care of your people and you gotta make money to be there for customers in the future.

Don't get me wrong, profit is critical, but your why behind that? Is more critical. I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek. Start with why, right? Read it multiple times, and that's at the core of how I try to live and how I try to build this thing. You're driving why gives purpose and meaning to everything else. Back to the start, I would just say if you got a family, like if you're married, you gotta be all in as a family. We had a lot of those because I got older kids, which means that this business directly impacts the amount of time I spend with them. If you don't wanna fracture your family or lose your kids when you're working 70 hours a week to build something, the best way to do it is do it as a family.

Involve them as much as you're able and make sure they understand the mission and vision of what you're trying to do, and let them celebrate the wins sitting around. We try to start the day and end the day around the table, and it's usually early, like six in the morning on weekdays that we're around the table, and then it's seven at night.

I work long and then I'm still working sometimes after that for an hour or two. It's long days. There's no shortcuts, but I think the critical thing is to make sure whether you have partners, of course, United. Shared values, but if you have a family, you gotta make sure they're all in. If you don't wanna lose them, because this is no joke.

I'm just a big believer. So that comes to the next point is you gotta be all in, man. I just think there's a lot of stuff out there, whether it's Twitter now X, right? Sometimes the message given on Facebook or other social media outlets, YouTube, there can be this idea of just quick success. I'm not gonna deny that there isn't some people out there that just magically snap their fingers and cry. I don't know. But I can say the vast majority, man, it's a grind. And what looks like instant overnight success usually has a backstory that goes back 10 years plus, and then you're just seeing the last couple years of their meteor rise. So I just think there's no shortcuts. So you have to be all in.

And that's why it comes back to the why and why you get up every morning and loving what you do, even though it's hard. I tell people early on, look, you're gonna wear a lot of hats and you're not gonna love everything you do, but you can find fulfillment and joy in what you do if your purpose is big enough. And that's what we try to do, right? It's not fun going in attics that are a hundred plus degrees to fix somebody to replace an air handler, plumbing, cleaning out drains. It's not fun, but you can find joy and fulfillment. In taking care of that customer, right? Five star service and solving their emergency situation, right?

And so you can find joy in the outcome and that's why it's great to tire to it. But man, it's just, you gotta be relentless in the early days and you gotta be all in. And I think the other thing that you can find a lot of distractions and you can try to start like two or three startups at once early on, because I didn't know what I wanted to do over the kind of sabbatical that we took.

Of that six month period, that's several different things. But once I decided Swift Pro is gonna be my thing, everything else is by the wayside. This is the first time I just said yes to a podcast. I was like, yeah, I can do Saturday morning. But most things, it's a no. You have to be ruthless in eliminating everything that doesn't contribute to your driving vision in the early days, because there's just too many things that can go wrong and momentum is everything. And so in the beginning, you have to create that momentum. You have to be that force of nature if you wanna go, especially if you want to go fast. That's what we're trying to do is go really fast. 

Austin Gray: You bring up such a key point there. So many things that we can dive into. I'm learning like the more seasoned I become with business, it's that it's work, right? It takes a lot of effort and for whatever reason, and I truly think it was the four hour work week culture. Did you ever read that book? 

Tyler Griffin: Yes, I did. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Like I, I just think that ruined so many millennials' work ethic because it reframed. It planted the seed that you could have this overnight success with this like quick software or e-commerce business where you could just run it from a beach and sit in a hammock and yes, make millions of dollars. And while there are some people, and I've had people on the podcast who have a similar type business, they work. Four or five hours a week, and they've got an e-commerce business that's printing cash. And you know what? I'm happy for 'em. Yes. But the reality is for most people. It's just not the case. I fell into that trap in my twenties.

I wanted to build that business, and I just finally came to the conclusion that not only is that not gonna happen to me, that's not what God designed me to do. There you go. I've worked my butt off my whole life, and the only thing that I've ever. Received any sort of success with was because of like physically working hard. And it was just something that my dad raised, like the way that my dad raised me, right? And so once I just accepted that was the role and why I'm here on this earth is no, like the reason is to find some joy and meaning in putting forth effort towards building something. And that led me back to the trades.

But I do think that this whole four hour work week mindset. Ruined a lot of people, myself included in my twenties. And so that was a big reason why I started this podcast was like, man, I just wanna bring on people who are like actively accepting the role of showing up and doing the work to build something over the long haul. That is committed to quality commits to taking care of your customers and commits to taking care of the people in the business. And so I think you bring a great approach here to the podcast. 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, I think so. From a business building standpoint, so many just wanna sprint towards multiplication and growing a team and maybe people that have built previously can do that really fast and scale and grow really fast. There are exceptions. I understand that. But again, I think those are like maybe the one percenters and I think too many of us try to fit into that box and think we're uber gifted, but the vast majority even highly successful people, and that's just not the way it is.

I have a principle for growth that I call 3M, so it's model, mentor, multiply. I think when you skip any one of those first, the first two steps and you just try to go straight to multiplication, it just doesn't work. 'cause first you have to build on a model, like what does success look like? And as an owner, for most of us, again, you have to be that model. So if you want work ethic. And drive and passion within your organization, you have to model that. That means in the early days for me, no one should work harder than me. Now, it doesn't mean I'm out there lifting things and I'm not trying to take credit for things that my team does in the field that are very difficult.

That's not the point. But they know like I'm the first one. In the morning on the phone dealing with whatever's happening that day trying to, and I'm the last one at night, right? There's very little that happens in the early days now of the company, and that'll shift over time. But in the early days, it's like I'm hands on. I'm shaping it, not micromanaging, but not handing off too soon. So it's that model that you have to build and then find others that can model things that maybe you're not as strong in, right? Like I know for myself, I'm really good at the big picture vision. I'm good at the trenches, right? Like that strategy side and then jumping in, creating momentum and energy.

I'm not great at creating systems and processes, right? So I brought on someone recently sooner than most companies would. I'm aware of that. Again, it's just because of how I'm building for the long term and going fast that I brought on someone that's really strong in that. So that's his main thing. He's over operations. He's gotta create those systems, processes, document everything. So we really have the written model, right? We have standards to hold everybody accountable. And then the mentoring. I think too many people skip that step. It's not just a system in process, it's the character. It's the intense work ethic, right?

I have one of my new sales guys living in my basement, right? And he gets real that life on life mentoring. He's sitting at the table sometimes at night with my family, and that's what he wanted. That's what he signed up for. A young guy, 25 years old and wants to be mentored and molded, has some natural gift and ability, but really wants. That, that kind of, that intensity for the jumpstart. So the mentoring, right? Again, across the whole team, you gotta make sure that you're infusing your values, that you're building a solid base, and then you can start to multiply and the process repeats itself, right? Because now you've created other people that are the models.

Now they can mentor and they can multiply. But when you go too fast and just try to multiply, it's like, what are you multiplying? You have nothing to grow off from. You don't have health at the core. And so that's what I'm fighting to. Create One other thing I wanna hit on that you mentioned that just brought to mind, I think it's an advantage. It sounds like you grew up this way too. So I grew up similar to Amish and Mennonite and we just worked all the time. It was working church and that was still my priorities. But we worked, I guess six days a week. We didn't have this weekend thing and we had home businesses. I worked on farms.

I'd get up in the morning, do my school homeschooled right from six to nine, and then the rest of the day we just worked, man. Whether it was for our family business, mowing the yard, most of our own food, taking care of animals or working for area farmers, but I didn't get paid for most of it, get paid very little, but to nothing. For most of my growing up years, it was contributing to our family and helping others. But what it did is I found joy in just working. And so when I had that break, I think a lot of people think they're gonna be happier when they have that idealistic four hour work week, but most people aren't actually happier.

Realize you're right, I'm I was created for chaos. So I can either create the chaos constructively towards a mission or. I'm going to sabotage and create chaos around me because that's how I'm wired. And so instead, I'm very intentional. I wanna try to keep my chaos at work, right? I'm gonna, because when you're in hypergrowth, you're growing fast. There's always gonna be chaos, right? But make sure it's constructive chaos. Make sure it's towards building something and you're fixing things. It's like there's chaos because people's. Air conditioner's breaking down and we're there to fix it, right? So if I found a business where there's constant chaos, the plumbing's leaking, all right, great, we gotta run to the rescue.

So now I've got my constructive chaos and, but I'm wired for that. I could have chose, I probably chose the hardest, but I just realized I'm wired to build things. My family understands that. Now my boys get to, I got 16 and almost. 14 and almost 12, but they get to see it. My oldest son's working for the business this summer, so they get to be in it. They get to hear our wins and losses every day and pray around the table for the business. Okay, we're down on sales, let's say some prayers and they watch me get up early the next morning and go fight to make it happen. I just think finding joy in work though, if you hate work, man, don't be an entrepreneur 'cause you're gonna do a lot of it.

Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bode and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. 

Austin Gray: Yeah it's so true. Like you, you hit on something there that resonates so much with me. I don't know about you, but I love this. Yes, I absolutely love this. Yep. And I couldn't picture it any other way. Something you said that resonates big time is I'm gonna create chaos one way or the other and I just need to do it in a constructive way 'cause very similar to you. I'm wired that way and I looked up yesterday and this is not my perfect day by any means, but yesterday I was like, I started at five, I took a break for dinner. 'cause I have in-laws in town. At five 30 I came back and then I was at it until nine again. And I went to bed last night.

I was like, I have this massive headache right now. 'cause I've been staring at a computer screen for literally like however many hours that was. But the reality is because there was like things that needed to be done before our busy season and I didn't think twice about it because I was finding joy in building the thing. And to your point, it's this whole small business journey is just full of that kind of stuff. But I like it and it sounds like you like it. And once again on the podcast, I just wanted this to be a real place that people could share what it's actually like building, because I think we see so many people talking about entrepreneurship online and whatnot, and these, a lot of people are getting sold.

The idea that. Oh, entrepreneurship is the path and they're considering quitting their job where they're making a couple hundred grand a year at tech sales. If you're doing a good job at, that might be the route to consider staying in, unless you wanna double your workload and cut your pay in half.

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, a hundred percent. We haven't paid ourselves a dime since we started and we put most of our cash reserve into the business and then lived off the rest. So yeah, theoretically the business is doing well enough to pay us. It's just that we're willing to suffer short term. In a sense, lower profits to reinvest it in the business, we're just doubled down on growth, right?

So we sprinted as opposed to a more gradual, and we were able to take a bigger swing because we had that ability. So you can do it slower and you may have to if you don't have that. Thankfully we had enough that where we could take a swing and we could go aggressive, and so far it's paid off and what it allowed us to do in a highly competitive market is blast our way onto the scene. Like on Google for example, we've gone from zero when we started in September to 184 reviews. Geez, right? Yep. And now we hit a hundred in mid-February. So from September to mid-February is when we crossed the hundred mark. So since mid-February to now, we've got almost another a hundred, we're gonna knock it out this week and we'll hit the 200 mark.

So the momentum's increasing dramatically. We'll do that in just over two months, and then we're trying to increase that pace and reward and celebrate that as a team that's. One of the top things we celebrate, not just getting a review, but getting a raving fan review. So that's what we're striving for every day and that's one of the things that we celebrate the most and that's given us some traction.

It was funny, I had one of my customers several months ago, he said, yeah, I've seen you guys around. You've been around for a long time, Evan, you, and it just, we give that impression 'cause guys have uniforms, our vans, I'm biased, but I think they're among the best looking in terms of the region. I'll have to send you some pictures, but they look pretty strong.

They're bold, they stand out. I think we picked a memorable name, long term that we're building off from, so it's been good. One other piece of the story that increased our momentum, so we just dabbled in plumbing to start with. And I limited what we did because we didn't have a master on the team. So we were careful what we did just helped out and we outsourced when we needed to.

So I had guys I could bring in when I needed to, but I was like, I gotta fix this. So in January, I think it was December, we put the ads out, but we were trying to find a master plumber to join the team and when it, the very first posted the ads. They're like, there's 50 ads out right now. Everybody and their mother's looking for a master plumber to bring on the team.

I'm like, all right, this is gonna be tough. It's a lot of prayer. Went into that one. But early on, I had a guy that applied in January and had just shut down his business in December. He's really great at. Plumbing, but he just struggled on the business end of things. But he had been a master plumber in the area for over 30 years running his own business for about 20.

And him and I, long story short came to terms and he came on the leader plumbing division, be my master plumber so we could be fully licensed and able to do everything. But I also brought, I didn't buy the business 'cause there was some challenges that he was working out debt wise on that. But I bought the brand, I bought his brand from him, like an asset thing, and we bought his phone number that he'd had for 20 years. So I have done nothing, no marketing for plumbing. He immediately was busy full-time just because we, I'm sure a lot was falling through the cracks. And we aggressively started using his previous customer list, which was receipts only. We had like names and numbers and not even addresses in some cases, but we started outbounding that, and then we just, the phone number, we'd get two to four calls a day in so far.

He's been busy full-time. He is booked out from over a week. We brought on another experienced full-time plumber, and so I have two guys in two vans running off of his previous client base for the most part. And now we cross sell of course, but now we're getting HVAC through that. So that was a big move and frankly it was a great deal for both of us because there wasn't a lot there in his business to buy from a brand perspective, but this phone number is customer base, the key, and then the fact that we took care of him and that he's still here, if that makes sense. I don't think it would've helped anybody else. They had to still have Kieran, the Irish plumber was the name, and so Kieran is the Irish plumber, and so we were able to transition that to now where if you look at our Google page, he gets a.

Ton of reviews and these are his previous clients that we now have traction with and it's really given us that acceleration. And so that's been a big key as well in building out our customer base in an accelerated way. And it was just a win-win and he's just a great guy. We've got total alignment in terms of values and the way we're trying to build the team. But I've got a guy that's been doing this over 30 years that's lead my plumbing division, but it's just, it's been fantastic. It was a little bit of a risk with the situation, what he was coming out of, but we were able to work through that and create a great win-win scenario. 

Austin Gray: Oh, this is great. I love that strategy of just being able to provide that person with the resources that they wish they would have always had, and then it's a win-win for you as well. I'm curious though, you said you were at in reviews 183. Is that what you said? 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah. At the moment, 184. 

Austin Gray: Okay. So whenever you start, you go in. That has obviously helped having an experienced plumber get those reviews. But before that, how do you think about building the marketing and sales engine for this business?

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, if you imagine a circle, I think just there's a lot of complex business diagrams out there. This is a simple one. If you imagine a circle and then it cut into to four. Pies, right? Like just divided into four, I think of the first one as brand, right? Brand and marketing. And then you come down to the lower right, and that's sales.

I. Then you go over to the left, it's this operation slash production in whatever your business is. It's making it happen. And then you have the finance side. And I think the biggest mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is they focus on only their area of strength. One of those usually. And then they just half-assed everything else, right?

Like it's not, and they're not, maybe they're not aware of their weaknesses and that's what derails, it's like the guy out in the gym who just works out his biceps. I'm really good at sales or I'm really good at operations. And then they wonder why their business doesn't grow. And it's because you have to have the whole thing and you don't get momentum going around that unless it's brand sales, operations, finance, right?

You have to have the full circle and you have to be aware, like you have to be, in my opinion. You have to build your knowledge out to where at least you understand that, or you have to bring in partners. Like my first go around in 2017. We had one partner that was great at marketing, I was great at sales.

We had another guy that did the production right? And another guy at the finance. You can do it that way. That's where maybe you have to do to learn it. But in that process, I was able to learn from those other guys and just experience how to oversee at least, and do certain things within that. I'll never be an amazing marketing guy.

I'll never be a bookkeeper, right? That's not my strength. Unless I, we're to focus on that and I shouldn't do that. But I need to understand it, right? At a foundational level, I need to, and then I need to know how to recruit for it. And I knew how to build teams for those areas. So I just think to back up that's critical.

So for the first thing I focused on to create momentum is brand. Okay. So we're gonna, we're gonna look like we're legitimate from day one. We're gonna wrap our vans. I paid $20,000 to have one of the top branding companies come up with a really amazing brand, and we worked at it for a few weeks to, in the first ones, I nixed all their initial designs and we gave them kind of the one that ended up taking the direction and they executed.

But from day one, we wanted legitimacy right away. We went hard after just. We'll come out and do anything basically and just get a review, right? So we were not cutting any corners. We didn't buy reviews. Every review had to be, they had to know us, and these are people we know we work for. And so we just, we went out hard and we got traction right off the bat, but we were like two weeks in, two to three weeks in.

We were doing everything we could for friends and whoever, just to get reviews, and then we had 20 reviews and then Google shut us down. Very know also, we're good. No, also we're gone. We have no presence. That was the only thing we had put effort into. Now the good, because I always believed there's something good that comes out of it.

What it did for me is, holy crap, I just put two to three weeks of really hard work. And I put all my eggs in one basket and it was just Google and I can't rely on one source, so I immediately pivoted while I was fixing Google and I went, Angie and I went Yelp, and I started. I'm gonna diversify as much as I can to build that brand.

I cannot be that vulnerable to where I depend on one marketing lead source. I. And we fixed the Google thing. It was a challenge. They, I think they were skeptical on something. We just had to go through a whole process. I think it was like our business address because it looked like we were sharing an office floor and we did have private offices.

We were leasing and we just had to prove that. So we had to go through a process with them, which was scary and tough, but we got it all worked out. I think within it was like maybe two weeks. But meanwhile, I was divers, diversifying as fast as I could. I just think you gotta build the brand out. That gives you credibility on the sales because a lot of people just jump right to sales and then they never build a real company.

Because if you don't have a brand, you can do a lot off of referrals. But in our competitive market, most people wanna see. They don't just want my, theoretically, my cousin or someone that's saying we do amazing work, but they wanna look at a credible source and make sure you're legitimate. And so that's what we try to do from day one, is just have legitimacy in all of those.

And then my focus was building the team and getting the right people on the team that could do what I wasn't good at. How did you fix the Google? Thing. It was submitting documents and we actually changed our address. It was a suite number issue, like we had gone back and forth and we ended up having to use the right suite number and then I put like a sign in the lobby, like I did everything I could to make sure that they would know we were legitimate because we weren't cutting corners.

I wasn't operating on my house. I had offices, I was leasing. I think we even sent the lease agreements to it. Like we, we did everything we could and just submitted and they basically accepted our appeal. But it took a while. You're not a priority for Google and we were nobody, I guess you're down for a couple weeks.

I was scary, but we got it proven that we were legitimate and just edited things, but we were guessing 'cause they wouldn't tell us exactly what was wrong. It was just that they flagged us and shut us down. So we just submitted a whole bunch of stuff to show our address was legitimate. Edited the suite number and did a bunch of things in the backend and then, and one of those things worked.

Austin Gray: And this was for a Google business profile? Yeah. Listing to have a pin on maps, correct. 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, if you go to Google US in this area and you'll, you pull us up? Yeah. It's just our Google profile. Yep. 

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialed in bookkeeping.com/ow ROPs. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off. 

Austin Gray: Cool. Yeah, so I had. Bodhi, they run all of our SEO at BearClaw and they're doing the new Texas Clearing business and whatnot. They are pros at local SEO, and I had Bodhi on the podcast a couple days ago for, I don't know, third or fourth time, and he was telling me that, so there's two different options with.

Google business profiles, you can do service area or you can do the location. And so he said right now it's more important than ever if you're starting a business to have location pin in your service area because he said it's next impossible to outrank somebody with a just a service area. And that was a little tidbit from that podcast that I wanted to share with our listeners here, but.

You bring up a very relevant topic that Bodhi was sharing is happening right now at Google. They're basically going through their whole database and wiping any review, any profiles that they think are fake, that they think are not actual businesses or don't have an actual office. And so that was the reason I was asking that question. What did you have to do specifically? And it sounded like it was all the way down to the granular level of a suite number. Lining up with your LLC paperwork or your business paperwork. 

Tyler Griffin: So that's, that was the other thing you reminded me of. The other thing I did, because I had created the entities before I had an office like this was all formed May of last year. We didn't even soft launch September. So I did get offices right away when we launched, but I had done all the entity paperwork and it was just tied to my house. So that was the other thing that could have been a source of the flag. So I went through, because there's a couple different things that you're registered through in Virginia at the state level, the contractor board level, I went through and made sure that the address reflected. What Google says and made it specific to the suite number in this case, and then consistent across the board with all legal documents. And so that was the other thing that we fixed on the backend rapidly as we could. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely. So listeners hear us out on this. What Tyler just did is very important. If you want your Google business profile to show up as a listing on Google Maps, and according to what Bodhi told me several days ago, map packs are the most important thing to rank. On Google right now, and what you're doing with getting as many reviews as possible is the best way to get there with a local pin.

So just a tidbit on the SEO side that I wanted to share there for listeners and I. Bodhi is telling me that everything has to line up in the video verification process. So you've got your marketing quadrant, you're the sales guy in your business. How do you think about going to recruit the rest of the pieces of the circle that you mentioned?

Tyler Griffin: In the beginning, everyone has to be more of a generalist because there's just too many hats to wear, especially when you're trying to go fast. We're at the point now where we're strategically realigning and it's like Jim Collins, right? People, right seats. That's where we're at. We're trying to get the foundation right?

So we're in the process of going from generalist to specialist. So like I said, if you're gonna be a solo entrepreneur, like the only owner, you have to understand all of those things. Or it can. Get bad. You have to know what you're hiring for and how to hold people accountable and expectations and do a lot of it in the beginning.

But then you rapidly hire people better than you at every area of the company that you can. So in terms of recruiting, we've gotten strategic by my CSRs are overseas, I just hire people with perfect English. That's really critical so that it doesn't sound like they're not local. And at the end of the day, I think what people.

Care about is it a human and are they professional and can I understand them easily? Like those are things that matter. I don't think it matters if they're in an office. In our local area, we have both. I have an office manager that's also on the phone supporting customers locally, but then we have international people as well.

I work through Sagan, so they recruit people as I need them on that side of things. And then so far. Our hiring on the field side, we have recruited for positions and then we're just really hard to make sure we have alignment. But like on the HVAC side, all of my guys have come through one guy and then this guy knows another guy and then this guy knows another guy and we're that way.

We protect the culture and we make sure like they're like, they've already worked with this guy. They know. He is a super hard worker, honest person, and I think. We've been blessed to, to create a protective culture. Like everyone is aware, like we have a good thing going and we don't wanna wreck that, right?

We don't wanna bring someone in. I've made a couple mishires, but I made a miss when I hired for a duct cleaning position. I just hired the wrong person. It just wasn't a good fit. I was one week in, and it was just didn't take one of our principles. Is this the concept of total ownership, right? We don't make excuses.

We don't blame, and so immediately I saw like this person was not taking responsibility. They were showing up late, and I'm like, all right, done. What's over? Just respectfully. Terminated their employment one week in. And then we found a guy that didn't have firsthand experience in duct cleaning, but was able to be trained quickly that did have all the work ethic and more, has been one of our model team members since hiring.

And yeah, just a lot. But again, he was known by someone else on the team in order to lead installers. And so that's the best way. And now I've got the thing where I'm like incentivizing my team members. I'd rather pay you than a recruiting agency to find someone. And the recruiting agency's been great.

I do have an outside recruiting agency that. Charges, reasonable amount, hourly rates, and they've been good at filling several strategic hires. But I always first look to the internal team and see what we can pull. And from the field side, that's where we've been able to get some great people on the team.

Austin Gray: My last question here before we wrap up at the top of the hour is that last section of the circle, the last piece of the flywheel, the finance section. Are you sitting in that role? Or did you recruit a fractional CFO or did you go use Sagan to find a CFO? 

Tyler Griffin: Yeah, I just brought on someone I knew through my church that is the bookkeeper for church in a part-time capacity to start with just because it was high trust, but little bit limited in terms of time and capacity maybe with some of the software side.

And so we use ServiceTitan, so they just pretty much lived in. They've helped with payroll, they've helped with QuickBooks and just keeping the books semi-organized and all of that. But it, we rapidly, when you go from, okay, we're at 20,000 to, all of a sudden we're doing 200,000 in revenue per month it changes dramatically.

And so we. Pulled back and did a kind of wide net search through Sagan, and we've got someone joining the team in just over a week from South Africa with a long background in finance, team leader, bookkeeper, just heavy background in doing what we need for our company. And so that person's joining in a full-time capacity.

And again, because of where they live, like we're paying them well for where they live, but we're able to bring on someone that can really. Live inside our business and clean things up. 'cause we need, job costing is not as clean as it should be. There's a lot of things that we've gotta clean up. The goal is that by 2026 we're running really clean in terms of tracking data and we're not there yet.

It's still messy. So while I have my in-law statements and my balance statements and I, and then I outsourced of course my tax side of things. So I have a, my CPA is someone I worked with the last company and so that's all outsourced and so he made sure he cleaned the books and made sure that everything was i's dot a t's crossed, not gonna have problems with the IRS, any of that.

So he cleaned everything up just a few weeks ago so that we could file our taxes for last year and all of that. But that's kinda how we're operating now. But we are bringing someone on full-time to really. Clean things up and integrate so that we can get ServiceTitan and QuickBooks and everything integrated a little bit better, and then better tracking mechanisms.

And early on, because we were going fast, like you have to live with some things not being perfect. I know our profitability's not as strong as it should be. Like we're currently paying a little bit too high on credit card fees, but. It's just a thing of I can't introduce too much complexity early on, and I just need it to work when I don't want my team members, my field guys getting frustrated because they're operating off seven different softwares.

I was very intentional and strategic about that. Everything runs through ServiceTitan and most of them, that's all they have to really use in the field. It's just service. Learn ServiceTitan, operate ServiceTitan. Not gonna introduce too much complexity early on until everybody's really solid with what we have, and then we'll look at our options.

Austin Gray: Absolutely. And I feel like we're in a very similar stage there, because like in the first several years of my business, it was like, all right, you gotta figure out how you're gonna get your leads. You gotta figure out how you're going to actually close jobs. And then three, you have to figure out how to fulfill that.

And then it's just push, push, push. Hard. And I don't know about you, but I was playing CFO role in the beginning, just wearing that hat. But I'm not a CFO, like I'm a marketing and sales guy, right? Like I love the marketing and sales and I just wanna drive growth, right? I'll look at the p and ls, but I'm just like, are we profitable?

Yes. Do we have cash in the account? Great. Yes. Let's keep moving. Run fast. That's me. But I'm at the stage right now where I know exactly where you're at. It's okay. We cross a 200 K month, like we need to have. Stuff buttoned up on our job costing, so that's a big focus for us this year. I'm curious to know, just like what's a rough range to hire someone full-time overseas?

Tyler Griffin: So with South Africa in particular, you can, I'd say the range is gonna be 1500 to 2,500 a month. So for us, we honestly got on the lower end of that and we're basically getting someone full time. With a really robust background, deep software skills, we're able to handle the technology complexity like with ServiceTitan and stuff for less than what we're paying someone part-time to do just 'cause of the pay rate difference.

And so that was a huge, that's a huge win for us and it allows us to, because I'm people first, right? So I want to pay my field people really well, but I gotta. Keep costs down in other places to do that. So that's what's allowed us to be strategic, where I can keep my costs down and then still I want the human element.

We'll bring more AI in as it makes sense, right? But we also wanna have that real human to human connection with our customers. And that's what we did. And I think I. It is a great option for small businesses to consider is bringing someone in from the outside and you have to vet them very carefully. And again, I have a CP on the outside that can double check. He has full access to our books. So you have to build trust, right? You still have to be careful, protect the business, but I think that's a great way to go to keep the cost lower. 

Austin Gray: I don't know about for you, but that's the scariest role for me to hire. Because you're just opening up everything to somebody else, and maybe this is just lack of experience in growing businesses to a certain level on my end, but I don't know if this is hard for you, but this one's really hard for me because we're gonna have to share account info and build a ton of trust, like you said, with that person.

Tyler Griffin: I'll put it this way. Yeah. Is trust, but verify I have everything integrated into QuickBooks. They won't need immediate direct access to certain things like bank accounts and all that. So I think it's gonna be incremental and then I'm gonna have several sets of eyes double checking everything. So it's trust but verify and they're, everything that they're touching and looking at is being looked at by others.

Okay. That's why strategically. I hired an ops guy you remember my circle illustration? I told him, look, my goal, it's not, we're not there yet, but my goal is I wanna live on the right side of the circle and focus on brand and sales. I need you to live on the left side of the circle. You focus on operations, the production side of things, and finance, right?

But I hired someone I deeply trusted that we vetted really hard, and then again is trust but verify he's a few weeks into to earning the trust in the trenches. Of myself and the team, but that'll be another set of eyes. And then I have the outside bookkeeping firm that does all of our taxes and all that stuff. So there, there's going to be some checks and balances put in place to protect us. That's not just, oh, here's everything. Here's the keys to the kingdom. Do your thing. It's not like that. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, for sure. And that your ops guy is in person? 

Tyler Griffin: Yes. He's in the office every day, unless he's on job sites. 

Austin Gray: Yep. Cool. Tyler, this has been fun. I think we could dive into many more topics here, but we are at the hour mark, so I wanna be respectful of your time. I know you got a business to run and a family to be a father to a great husband as well, so I appreciate you coming on and sharing insight. This has been a lot of fun.

Tyler Griffin: Thank you. It's been great. 

Austin Gray:  Cool. I'd love to have you on again and just talk more deeper operational strategies and just dive deeper into the nitty gritty of the business. But let's go ahead and wrap this up. Where can listeners find you online? 

Tyler Griffin: I. Yeah, as far as our company, if they're just like wanting to look at that, it's go swift pro.com, but I am on Twitter on X scrappy startup, so definitely on that. And then I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. Tyler Griffin, you can search me and look up Swift Pro. I'd love to connect with people, especially in the entrepreneurial business, building blue collar. Community, right? So blue collar people, definitely let's connect and I'm all about collaboration and growth and learning from others. We certainly don't have it all figured out, man. We're just getting going.

Austin Gray:  Awesome. I can resonate with you on that. I definitely don't have it figured out. Listeners, thanks for listening to the podcast. You guys know that I don't have it all figured out. I'm just here to do my best to extract the learnings and the insights from other people like Tyler, so that.

We can help you on your growth journey in building a small business, especially in blue collar trades or services. So thanks again for listening to another episode. We publish weekly episodes every Friday, and we send a newsletter with a recap of the high level learnings every Saturday. So if you have not signed up for the newsletter, you can go do so at owner ops.com/newsletter.

That's ownrops.com/newsletter. And then finally, if you're enjoying. If these episodes, we would sure appreciate a five star review, very similar to what Tyler has done with 184 reviews at Swift Pro. Podcasts are the exact same way. So if you've received some value, would you mind to leave us a review on Spotify on Apple, and then if you're listening on YouTube, we would sure appreciate a like and subscribe to the channel so that you're notified whenever we publish the episodes.

Finally, I had the founder of OpenPhone on the podcast several weeks ago, and we are going to implement a text line into the business where a lot of you'll reach out to me, and I'm sure Tyler gets the same thing on X with specific questions about business. So what you're gonna be able to do is just text your questions in the number below, in the link in the description, and we will answer questions with our guests live on the podcast.

So I hope this is gonna be something that's beneficial for you guys. We're testing it out, but would love your feedback as well. So we're gonna wrap this one up. Y'all have a great week. We'll see you next week. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

‍