And that philosophy works today if any of my people comes up and says, I want to join PHCC or the mechanical contractor. So what is, I said, that’s fine but next year you want to volunteer and be on the board and you’re going to attend every meeting or have somebody attend the meetings. And we are still practicing that today and we live by that. We want to be on the board because they seem to be the people that can get things done and you have to be willing to do things that other people don’t want to do. If you’re going to grow and make your company successful, sometimes you’re going to bite your tongue, you’re going to turn your head around and do the things that other people don’t want to do. So, it’s been a tremendous journey, being with a national ACCA, being their chairman. I never met so many great people in this industry.

And you are in a society of great smart people and you know what? We need it, how many homes you look around that don’t have air conditioning, don’t have refrigeration. Get into the commercial side, they’ve got to have what we have to offer and it’s a journey and it’s a great journey. I was fortunate to have three sons and three sons that went into the business with me and none of them did I ask to. They came to dad and said, look, I’d like to be part of the organization. The oldest son came first and he is now president of the company. They booted me out about four years ago and he called me a CEO. I could give you some definitions of the CEO, but it may not be nice to know. But right now I do work about 30 hours a week and go in late and leave early and have off of my Fridays.

But that’s some of the benefits of having great people around you and when I say great, I mean that they’re not good, they are great. To put up with me and my sons, we demand you to be great and we’ll push you to be great and I think that’s important that you look at people when you hire them. We hire for attitude, a lot of that means a lot to us. The rest of the education is good and so forth, but you’ve got to be the right mix to be with CroppMetcalfe and I have three sons and people tell you about family businesses. Well, there are three problems I think you have in family businesses. One is the leadership, one is money and one is the future with them. And with my sons, we resolved the money issue. That’s been fixed. They know what a president gets, they know what a director gets, a vice-president gets, they know what all these levels are. And if the president decides that he wants an increase in his income, the same percentage goes into the line.

So, that is not a disturbance from the money aspect. Responsibilities, all of them have to know what their responsibilities are. They got job descriptions, they know what they’re supposed to do and they are held accountable for it. They are just like anybody else that we would hire and I think that’s two of the biggest things that we have in a family business. And because some people are worried about the issue of whether he works more than I do or my job is more important or what have you. So you overcome those things and then you have a plan if something happens. You cannot run an organization without a plan. You need a plan of action for a number of things. And we got manuals that would stack up here, thank goodness it went to computers because now it’s in the computer somewhere. But you’ve got to have plans and your goals and you stay on top, you hold people accountable.

And sometimes that’s difficult because every now and then that comes up to me that says, Mr. Cropp, this guy has been working here for 30 something years and 40 years and he’s not doing what he used to and I understand he’s one of your sacred cows. I’m saying, I’m approachable, so I say, well, let me talk to him, but it’s y’all decision. And they made the right decisions because you get people who are as old as I am trying to climb a ladder or getting into an attic and so forth.It’s just a little difficult for us sometimes to get up there. But this year our goal is to be in the mid 40 million. We’ll do somewhere in {inaudible 07:49} of 40 some million split in business. We’ve got residential HVAC, we’ve got commercial HVAC, we’ve got plumbing, we’ve got plumbing commercial, we stepped out on faith about four years ago and got into the pest control business because we felt it was a service business to our residential customers.

And it was something that we could dispatch, we could handle the people and it would not be very difficult for us to be part of that business. One of my goals has been to offer any service product. that’s out there that the homeowner needs we could eventually offer it to them. If they call the wrong number and said, they want a pizza, we should get them a pizza. We’ll call a pizza company and say, deliver this pizza. And we’ve also, we had four locations at one time, we’ve consolidated down to one Maryland, one Virginia location now and the consolidation I was against. But thank goodness, my sons now knew what they were doing because now we do all the dispatch to one location and all that customer service out of one location, all of that bookkeeping out of one location payable, everything is done in one location now. And I was having it done in multiple locations so I wasn’t too smart, I guess. But you’ve got to listen and because I guess, I was almost up to $5 million in sales before I realized I couldn’t do it all.

I bet you there’s some people in there right now I think they’ve got to touch everything in their business. You’ve got to be there, you got to see it, the empowerment of people is golden. Have great people around you, let them run your business and I was at least 5 million before that and 5 million was probably at about 200,000 per person. I can’t work it out. I need people for that. But anyway, that many people run around and we had to order a truck. I’d go to order that truck. If we made a big buyer from one of the manufacturers, I had to be involved in that. If we hired somebody, I had to be involved in that. Well, it doesn’t work out that way if you’re going to grow. If you want to grow, get some great people and make it happen. On the back of every one of our business cards we have that commitment. When we give it to a customer, they see what our company stands for right on the back of it and we’re proud of this. We are proud that we can live up to these standards.

David Heimer: Hi, this is David again, that wraps up this part of the interview with Mitch Cropp. I want to thank Mitch for doing that. He was incredibly generous with his time and always interesting and informative. So, thanks very much, Mitch and we’ll have more segments from Mitch in the future. There are three other things I’d like to mention: our show is patiently produced, edited, and mixed and fixed by Ruben Divine., thanks very much, Ruben. Secondly, we’re always looking for good ideas and interviews for our podcasts. If you have an idea or maybe you think you should be interviewed, just shoot an email to profilesinprosperity@serviceroundtable.com that’s profilesinprosperity@serviceroundtable.com. Third thing if you think what we’re doing has any value, it would be very helpful if you would give us a great rating on iTunes. Thanks for your support. Hope to see you again soon. Bye Bye.