Podcast #100

“Matt Michel”

Featuring Matt Michel and David Heimer

Intro: Welcome to Profiles In Prosperity. The leading podcast for residential service contractors, sponsored by Service Roundtable and hosted by David Heimer.

David Heimer: Hi, this is David Heimer. Before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to mention two things. First, I wanted to say thank you to Daikin Comfort Systems for sponsoring this episode. I have a huge appreciation for Daikin, for their support for us, and for what they’ve created in our country. Specifically, I’m referring to their manufacturing facility outside of Houston. Did you know it is the largest heating and air conditioning manufacturing facility in the world? And they built it right here in the USA. You know what that means. Jobs for Americans. I love that. If you get a chance, please ask for a tour of the Daikin manufacturing plant. It’s really impressive. You’ll learn a lot and it’s fun to see. The second thing I wanted to say before the episode begins is that this is a little bit of a self-indulgent episode. As Matt Michel and I were departing Service Nation after 20 years, people kept asking us a lot of questions about Service Nation, how we started it, our memories. They wanted stories and insight. So this episode is all about that. It is a little bit self-indulgent, but you’ll find it interesting and we’ll wrap up with some advice for contractors. So enjoy.

David Heimer: Hi, this is David Heimer. Welcome to Profiles In Prosperity. Well, we’re going to do something really fun and different today. I’m here with Matt Michel and Liz Patrick, and we’re going to talk a little bit about Service Roundtable and Service Nation and just talk about how it was started and where it went, and some of the funny stuff that happened along the way. People have been asking us to do this for a long time, so we’re finally doing it. We’ve asked Liz to ask the questions because she’s good at that kind of stuff. So Liz and Matt, welcome to Profiles In Prosperity.

Matt Michel: Thank you, David.

Liz Patrick: Thanks, David. Thanks for letting me kind of take over your podcast today. I think we got to go all the way back to the very beginning and talk about how you and Matt initially met.

David Heimer: We met at Lennox. Matt and I both worked at Lennox. I was in IT, we called it…

Matt Michel: MIS.

David Heimer: MIS which was Management Information Systems. And Matt was in manufacturing. And I remember we went to a manufacturing conference and realized we had actually been at school together briefly.

Matt Michel: So we were sitting at this conference and at lunch, there was the VP of manufacturing at Lennox at the time who had a personal computer. A personal computer was very rare because the MIS people guarded them zealously, didn’t want too many people to have them. Well, this guy was an executive so he had one but he didn’t really know what to do with it and he would turn it on every now and then, I think, I’m not really sure if I remember it being on, but he had one. And I know at one point in time, we swapped out his monitor because he had a color monitor and we needed it to test something and we forgot to change it back and he never noticed.