
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.
But David and I were sitting at this table and we were sort of talking about and talking about this guy and we came up with our own version of the executive PC, which was basically an empty cardboard box and a screen that was really just a projection screen. And we would have three or four slides, one with a spreadsheet, one with a word processing document that you could change periodically so that he could have all the status of having a computer without really having to do anything with it. And we thought we could sell these for a lot less money and Management Information System directors would buy them left and right because it would solve their problem of giving executives computers.
Liz Patrick: So that was your first collaboration?
David Heimer: That was it. Sadly we never took that product to market, but I think it had great potential.
Liz Patrick: So then how did you guys actually finally partner together and start Service Roundtable? When did you start working together on this? I know it was your idea, Matt.
Matt Michel: Well, we worked together on projects within Lennox, and a lot of times we did some things that were sort of like internal scut works. I would need some information for something that I was working on and would go to David and David would find a way to get it to me and then I would pay him back by giving him marketing trash and trinkets that the IT guys never got. He loved that stuff. And then when I was at a different company, we started working on a flat rate pricing system and David was in the middle of that. That never did go anywhere for various reasons. Not because I thought we had a bad product. We thought we had a good product, but just the way circumstances worked out. And so we just kind of treaded water for a while. And then when the concept of the Service Roundtable and Service Nation came about, David was a natural guy to support the IT and internet aspects of the products.
Liz Patrick: So what did those early, early, early days look like?
David Heimer: You know, it’s funny, we worked really hard. First of all, we raised money and Matt put together this great meeting with potential investors and they gave us money. Sort of surprised me but they gave us money and then we realized that we were really going to have to work and build this. And then Matt and I would meet at nine or 10 at night and we’d work until two or three in the morning. And we were killing ourselves but the weird thing about it is, I remember it being a lot of fun. We’d meet and we’d work hard but we were laughing all the time. It was great.
Matt Michel: And we kept awake because there was this coffee machine that they had there that predated the Keurigs. It was called the Flavia.
David Heimer: I forgot about that.
Matt Michel: I think we used a thousand Flavia little tubes to make Italian roast coffee and all kinds of stuff.
David Heimer: Yeah, fueled by caffeine. It was great.
Liz Patrick: I certainly remember you guys coming in and drinking coffee when I first came to work for you and I was in the kitchen.
David Heimer: Yeah, still caffeine addicts, I think. Yeah. And you were drinking your diet coke.
Liz Patrick: This is true. So I have my own caffeine.
Matt Michel: And in fact, the reason we started buying soft drinks in the office is to keep you well caffeinated.
Liz Patrick: So a lot of years went past, there’s a lot of successes and a lot of failures. When you look back, which failures have turned out not to be failures?
David Heimer: That’s a tough question. I think some of the times failures I put out of my mind. But I also think that a lot of times they weren’t so much failures as they were something that we learned a lot from. The first time we put on meetings, they were awkward, we were a little bit disorganized and we didn’t have the attendance that we wanted to have at them. And sometimes I felt really disappointed about those. But the fact is we learned a lot by doing that. And I think about the time we did a big meeting in Australia. Remember when we went to Australia? And the American contractors had told us, “If you have a meeting in Australia, all the contractors in America–”
Matt Michel: “We’ll all go! If you go to Australia, we’re there. Everybody is going to go to Australia!”
David Heimer: Exactly. And almost none of them went.
David Heimer: And so I was really disappointed by that. But it turned out to be a great experience. We learned a lot out of it.
Matt Michel: We got a lot of Aussies.
David Heimer: Yeah, the Australians certainly appreciated us being there and we got a lot of Australian members as a result of doing it. But it wasn’t quite the smashing success that I hoped for. I mean, I don’t look back on it as a failure, just kind of a learning experience I guess.
Matt Michel: I’ll tell you the one that hurts me and that I think we had the right idea and I don’t know why it didn’t catch on, is when we had worked out a program with the University of North Texas to where we would do a training program and those credits could then be applied towards a degree at UNT so that at the end of this training program that UNT would actually put on, and at the end of this, people would be really close to getting their degree if that’s something they decided they wanted to do. And I don’t necessarily think it’s necessary and I certainly know a lot of contractors who don’t have degrees. I think it’s necessary to continually learn and continually educate yourself and certainly, the best contractors do that. But there are some that feel the societal need that I need to have a sheep skin on the wall. Which this would have provided that but it just went nowhere. And we had a lot of people commit and say, “Yeah, I’ll do it” and it just went nowhere. So we killed it.
Liz Patrick: Yeah. Were there others?
Matt Michel: Well, David was talking about meetings like the one in Australia and we sort of found that there are a number of contractors that are reluctant to fly over water.
Liz Patrick: Yeah, I remember that.
Matt Michel: We had a meeting in Puerto Rico which was an awesome meeting, awesome location, awesome venue, everything, US territory, no passport needed. We thought it was going to be a home run all the way. And it was a great meeting but we had a lot of people who wouldn’t come because it was over. We found that our relationship with one of the trade shows, which was really good initially and they had us close our fall meeting and co-locate with them with the unwritten agreement between the two of us that we would not lose money. Well, we started losing lots of money because the people that we had all the unwritten agreements with all left, and that eventually led to Service World.
David Heimer: Yeah. I don’t know, do you remember how we came up with the name of Service World Expo by the way?
Matt Michel: Yeah, it had service and we were looking. Service World just sounded big and serviceworldexpo.com was available.
David Heimer: So we were sitting in a conference room and we were trying to come up with the appropriate name and I remember thinking, “Let’s see what the pattern is, the pattern. Service Roundtable, Service Nation, what comes after that? Service World.” And I blurted out, “Service World” and Matt said, “Service World Expo.”
Liz Patrick: Boom.
David Heimer: “Look it up.” And I looked it up and we had the URL so it was perfect.
Liz Patrick: Do you remember how we started designing Service World Expo?
Matt Michel: Yeah, so I wanted to do something that was different, so we approached this as exhibitors as well as attendees. Because we’ve been an exhibitor at a lot of meetings and we’ve attended a lot of meetings and most of the people that put on shows, they put it on only from one perspective and not the other. And so it seemed to me that every show was laid out like a grocery store with {inaudible 10:06} aisles. So I took what became the events team and we went first to an IKEA and we wandered around through an IKEA and I could see everybody’s light bulbs going off that, yeah, this is it. And then we went to a Central Market which if you don’t know is a ridiculously priced high-end grocery store in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that is laid out like an Ikea and you get lost in there and you see all kinds of different stuff and you spend a bunch of money. And the idea on Service World is we wanted our contractors to get lost in the exhibit hall, to meet lots of exhibitors, find lots of things that would help them make money in their business and do business. And that is indeed what’s happened. And I think it’s a unique show in that regard. We’re the only one that I know of that’s laid out that way and we make a conscious effort. We could be a lot better at it if it wasn’t for the freaking fire marshal.
Liz Patrick: This is true. Going back to Service Nation and Service Roundtable, I know a lot of people have asked you guys over the years, why $50 a month?
Matt Michel: Steve Saunders from Tempo was one of our founders. He’s one of the first guys to really get excited about the Service Roundtable concept and he insisted on $20 a month. That $20 is exactly what it needed because $20, our marginal cost of adding the members just for merchant services {inaudible 11:19}, $20, we could scale it huge. We could be big, we could make it easy for anybody. And I thought $50 would be the same. Anybody could afford $50 a month and it wouldn’t limit or inhibit anybody to join. And we wanted to make it affordable to the smallest contractor because that was our charge and our mission when we started out was to help improve the industry and help these small guys that were overlooked by all the alliances, all the dealer programs. Everything was generated for the top 5%. So we were trying to be affordable to everybody. And then it turns out that the people who were the most likely to see the value of jumping in and joining were the largest contractors because they said this is a no-brainer.
And smaller guys, when they do join, they don’t stay small. They tend to grow. And we got a bunch of them in our membership base now that are large contractors but they weren’t when they joined. And the common denominator with us, it’s not that we are this size or this size or this size, it’s not geographic location. It’s that all of our members are growth-oriented. All of them want to grow. And that’s what attracts them to us and it’s what attracts our Roundtable Rewards partners to the program because they want growth-oriented contractors who are going to grow organically and we got them.
Liz Patrick: We never changed that price.
David Heimer: Still a good price
Liz Patrick: So over the years, what has surprised each of you most about what we’ve accomplished or done or rolled out?
David Heimer: I’m sort of surprised that every contractor isn’t a member. It’s just such a no-brainer. And it turns out that if you add up all the contractors that are members of all the organizations in our industry, it still ends up being a relatively small fraction of all the contractors. Most contractors aren’t a member of anything. And for $50 a month, they could be getting great information, they could be streamlining their business, they could be getting great rebates, they could be working with some fantastic vendor partners, working with other contractors, and growing their business. So that’s the part that just surprised me. I mean, we’ve got more members than any other group. We thought that after five years or so, we would have something like 10, 20% of the market and that hasn’t happened. We still got a ton of members but not what I wanted.
Matt Michel: The original business plan I think had 10,000 members after five years and we thought then we would start expanding into other vertical markets, other industries and within the next five years we’d double it. And here we’re after 20 and we’re not quite to six. So it’s still bigger than anybody else but we should be 60,000.
Liz Patrick: And I remember cycles of where it felt like you worked really, really, really hard, and then it got easier. It’s like you crested a hill but then it feels like you have to continue to climb another one and climb another one and climb another one.
David Heimer: I felt that most, Liz, with Roundtable Rewards because I remember one year, and it was back in the days of Comfort Tech, we had just launched Roundtable Rewards, and you and I were going around trying to talk to vendor partners and they were somewhat skeptical about us.
Liz Patrick: They were a lot skeptical.
David Heimer: Okay, they were a lot skeptical about us. It felt like we were pulling teeth. And one year later, we went to Comfort Tech and we thought, same thing, we’re going to be meeting with these guys. And they were lining up to meet with us. It was crazy how busy we were. The whole Comfort Tech was just basically one vendor meeting after another. And so like you said, in that one year, we just had this huge peak. It was an amazing experience.
Liz Patrick: Yeah. And I remember flirting with the million-dollar payout. We thought we were going to hit it and it took like four or five more quarters and we finally did and it just never went back.
David Heimer: Yeah, 1 million, 2 million right away. Yeah, it’s true. The first million is {inaudible 15:03}. You hear it all the time. The first million is hard to hit and after that, it comes a whole lot easier. It’s absolutely true. The second million came a whole lot faster than the first.
Liz Patrick: So thinking about Service World, does it surprise you that we’re having meetings, that you enjoyed having the meetings? Because you were never going to have a meeting, Matt.
Matt Michel: I never wanted a meeting. And if you look at the fact that we’ve got a whole team of people that work full-time year-round on Service World, I think that just proves the point. The only reason that we created Service World was there was not a trade show in that niche. The one that was there was starting to fail and there was nobody else that could step up and do it. It was us or nobody. And so we did it and we did it somewhat reluctantly. But if I could go without having meetings, oh I would do it in a heartbeat.
Liz Patrick: But they’re fun.
David Heimer: Talk a little bit about the impact of ISH because when we went to ISH, I felt like I saw potential that I had never seen before.
Matt Michel: Well, ISH started out as another failure. So we thought, we’re going to take a group of contractors to ISH, the world’s largest trade show in Frankfurt, Germany. Who wouldn’t want to go to this? And the first one, we got Ron Smith lined up to lead a small seminar. I thought we’d have 30, 40 guys and I think we had what, three or four?
David Heimer: Yeah, maybe five total.
Matt Michel: And the thing is we got into this show and it just blew everybody away. It was massive. We think AHR is a big show. AHR is nothing. ISH is mammoth exhibit hall after mammoth exhibit hall. And the way that they do business is different. They have full kitchens in the show booths and the show booths are multi-stories. And they serve beer and wine and they entertain people and they do business there. And we walked away from that thinking, “Wow we got a lot of room to grow in our domestic shows.”
David Heimer: Yeah, if you remember back to Comfort Tech, we had our own pavilion inside of Comfort Tech and one of our innovations was we had beer. There was no alcohol served at those points in time so we had beer. And when the rest of the trade show was basically empty, there we were, ours was packed with contractors.
Matt Michel: So if you remember the old COMDEX show, which is a computer show, Microsoft had its own pavilion and they had people that they invited in, you know these special ones that got to be in the Microsoft pavilion and these guys fought over being there. And so I thought well, let’s do that. And that’s when we came up with the Service Roundtable pavilion. And then we had beer because we had beer at ISH. Now, we used beer at a number of shows. I remember there was a Canadian show, the CMPX show where we had beer and we realized that the age thing was there. So we thought in the US we could ask for IDs and if you weren’t 21 you couldn’t have it. But the students showed up and they could drink at 18 in Canada. So we started demanding that they turn in business cards. So these guys would give a business card and then the guy would give them a beer. Finally, this guy comes walking down from three or four booths down there and says, “I think you have all my business cards.”
David Heimer: Yeah, the students loved us. Wasn’t so good for business but it was great for the students.
Matt Michel: Yeah, but I think the shows were important and the shows serve a valuable role and we need to pay more attention to them, especially after COVID. Our response has been, if there’s a show, we’re there and we’re going to put the flag up and we’re going to talk to as many people as we can face to face and live.
David Heimer: Yeah, I think it also speaks to the need for the industry to support those. Contractors, you need to go to these shows. You learn a lot at them, you learn from other contractors, you get to see new products, you get some time away from the business to think about the business. Those shows are tremendously valuable. And of course, plug, I think that Service World Expo is the best of those.
Matt Michel: It is. No, it absolutely is. This is the largest show with a residential service and replacement focus in the industry and it serves HVAC and plumbing and we’re growing the remodeling side and electrical. But it is focused like a laser on what these guys are focused for. AHR, great show. If you want to buy a chiller, awesome place to go. But if you’re a residential contractor, Service World is it.
Liz Patrick: So after a long time being in the industry, what’s the number one thing you would recommend a contractor do?
David Heimer: Oh, well, that’s easy, join Service Roundtable or Service Nation Alliance. I suppose that’s cheating. I should probably come up with something else.
Liz Patrick: A little bit. Matt, what’s your number one?
Matt Michel: One and two go hand in hand. So one is that they got to grow and too many contractors are complacent to just kind of exist. And then when they kind of exist, they don’t really run a business, they got a company that they own, but the company really owns them. They can take off any afternoon they want, but they can’t take off for a week. If something happens to them, what’s their family going to do? I mean, the single truck operator is the most selfish contractor in the industry. But if you grow, everything becomes more fun. Everything becomes more interesting. And you can grow to the point where the business doesn’t need you, then you’ve got a true business. And I remember with us, we had one time we went to ISH, and so in Frankfurt, Germany, and then I stayed over for a little while with my wife and we did some tourist things, came back, was back in the office for a few days, then went to Australia because we were launching the Alliance in Australia.
So I was over there for a few weeks, again, at the back end, did a little of the tourist things, came back. I had basically been gone for two months and I remember coming back, everything was better. Sales were way up and all of you guys said, “If you’ll just stay away more, look what we can do.” And I realized that the business didn’t need me. And rather than being something that was threatening, that was incredibly empowering because then I could work on the things that I wanted to work on and I could delegate off the things I didn’t like. I mean, David didn’t have enough on his plate so I could give him more work to do.
Liz Patrick: Somehow that filtered down.
Matt Michel: But it is so much better to grow a business. I say this all the time, but look in your backyard, everything you see is growing or dying. It’s the same way with people. It’s the same way with companies. And if you have a company that’s full of people that are trying to grow personally, your business is inevitably going to grow. And if your business grows, you got a business that will be attractive to somebody else that will have an exit strategy when we choose to take it. So growth is important but with that, you’ve got to grow profitably, and to grow profitably, you’ve got to price right. And contractors are afraid to charge what they need to charge. Just try it, raise your prices, see what happens. My guess is nobody will notice. And the greatest price resistance in an organization is between the ears of the technicians and the owners of the company.
Liz Patrick: So I’ll bounce back to you for a recommendation David.
David Heimer: I think it’s about branding. I think that a lot of contractors don’t think enough about building their own brand and the value of their own brand. And we know that when people work with us, we help them create powerful local brands that they do so much better in so many different ways. It’s easier for them to market, their sales go up, it’s easier for them to attract the right people to them. When it comes time to sell their business, their business is worth a lot more. So building a brand and thinking carefully about what your brand is, is really important. It makes a huge difference and it impacts a whole lot of things. I always remember that Dutton Plumbing, for example, they are the company you would send to your mom’s house. And when you think about what that means, who are you going to send to your mom’s house? You want the clean-cut guy. You want the person that’s going to take good care of your mom. You want somebody who’s going to treat them ethically and honest. Who does that mean you’re going to hire? Who’s going to apply for a job at that company? You’re only going to hire people that you would send to your mom’s house. So branding, all that fits in. It’s part of your culture, it’s part of how you market, it’s how you present yourself. It’s huge. But if you do it right, it makes such an enormous difference. And you look at our members that have done a good job with it, it’s made a huge difference for them. So I think it’s all about branding. Not all. There are so many different things you could say, but branding is certainly one of the most important ones.
Liz Patrick: You touched on culture and I think that when I have listened to you talk about that, Matt, that it’s very critical to the growth. So that kind of ties the growth to the branding, to the pricing, right? The culture has got to be a piece of that, doesn’t it?
Matt Michel: So I didn’t get culture. I mean, we had a good culture but I didn’t really understand how it got there or what we could do to shape it until we went to the Disney Leadership Institute. So we took some contractors. This is another one of those things that we tried that didn’t work, but if we go to the Disney Leadership Conference, everybody will want to go. We took a group to Disney. And at Disney, culture is shared values and values dictate certain behaviors, and behaviors drive results. So in the Disney equation, culture drives results. And that makes perfect sense to me because if you think about it, culture is self-executed. If you have the right culture, it will execute whether you’re there or not because you will have people that have similar values which will do certain behaviors over and over again and the results will be there. And that’s why Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. See, a great strategy has to be executed. Culture is self-executed.
David Heimer: Do you think we’ve given enough top tips for contractors?
Matt Michel: Well, I think we’re in the start of 2023 and I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the potential for a recession this year. David has one of the things that he does, you know, there’s the real world and there’s David World.
Liz Patrick: I’ve heard of David Day. I hadn’t heard of David World.
David Heimer: No, David has David World where he imagines the things the way he thinks they should be. And if they’re not, he will try to do everything he can to will them into making David World a reality. And he won’t accept anything else. And you can see this at play all the time, where somebody will say something and he just won’t accept it. That’s the approach that you need in a recession because when a recession comes, look, a deep recession is a 3% reduction in GDP. We can overcome 3%. I mean, our seasonality in the HVAC industry is far more than that. We can cover 3%. And it’s just that don’t let the news media get in your head. Don’t let the pessimists get in your head. Just decide that if there’s a recession, you’re not going to participate and you’re going to drive the company forward and you’re going to work a little bit harder and you can make up any deficit in the economy.
Liz Patrick: Well, in addition to that, if you’re positioned that way, I think you come out of it stronger. You grow faster, don’t you?
Matt Michel: Yeah. When you’re in a recession, it’s like you’re running a race into a headwind. Your competitors are going to stop, they’re going to get tired, they’re going to stop at the side of the road, walk or sit down. And if you put a little more effort, you can maintain the same pace, then that gap will be insurmountable and eventually, the wind is going to shift and the wind will be at your back and then you’ll be flying.
Liz Patrick: Exactly.
David Heimer: And you’ll be way ahead of your competitors at that point in time.
Matt Michel: And that’s where the market share is gained. Market share isn’t gained during good times, it’s gained during bad times.
Liz Patrick: Very much so.
David Heimer: Yeah.
Liz Patrick: So funniest story you remember from the last 20 years.
David Heimer: Oh my God, there’s so many.
Liz Patrick: I keep hearing about the time I asked Matt to carry a small black bag through a security checkpoint.
Matt Michel: Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Liz hands me a bag to carry through security. Bells start ringing, things start going off. She had box cutters in there and scissors.
Liz Patrick: One box cutter.
Matt Michel: All kinds of stuff. And she hands it to me. I nearly lost TSA privileges. So one of the things that’s been really good is we had a lot of great people that we work with and I can remember there are some things that it’s like it was meant to be. I remember one time we were in Toronto and we were there at a trade show and we turned the corner on the street and we looked up at the top of the hill and there was Vicki and John LaPlant and it was like, what are the odds? And they were there working with a contractor. And we had a close relationship with them through the years, which really goes back to Lennox days, but we were able to bring them into our program and they’ve done a world of good for a lot of people.
David Heimer: Same is true of Jim Henshaw.
Matt Michel: Same with Jim Henshaw. And I can remember when I had this soccer mom who was watching the practices because she didn’t trust the coach or something, I don’t know. She was one of those helicopter moms. But I was doing this survey on the Yellow Pages, if you can remember those. That was back when we had these phone book things. And anyway, I handed her one of the surveys to fill out while she was there. Well, turns out she’s a former Yellow Pages rep. As soon as I heard that, I started talking to her about coming to work for us, and she did. And man, yeah, Liz Patrick is the one who built Roundtable Rewards.
David Heimer: Yeah, that was a really good one. So funny stories is the ghost pepper story.
Liz Patrick: Oh yeah.
David Heimer: And we’ve got actually multiple hot sauce stories around here. There’s just a whole bunch of stuff about hot sauce because Matt and I both really like hot stuff and other people in the company don’t feel the same way. So we had a company outing one time to go to, I think it was Texas Roadhouse.
Matt Michel: Rooster’s Roadhouse.
David Heimer: Rooster’s Roadhouse. We went to Rooster’s Roadhouse and Matt challenged everybody to eat a Hell Slider. Now, I thought it was just a joke when they brought out the waiver for you to sign, the legal waiver before you ate one of those Hell Sliders. But it turns out there’s actually a medical reason why you have to sign away and agree that you won’t sue them. So I took one bite of it. I like hot stuff. I took one bite and stopped immediately and started guzzling water. And I asked them to bring me milk and everything to try and get this. Matt ate three of them and then Sarah ate one. Anyway, so we went back to the office with some dire effects. Matt went home with {inaudible 28:56} that day.
Matt Michel: Well, all of a sudden, I felt a strange rumbling. And as fast as I could casually walk to the bathroom, I went, and I felt like somebody was taking my intestines and just twisting them in a knot. And it’s the closest a man can come to the experience of giving birth, I think. And I leaned over and sweat is pouring off me like I’ve just run a marathon. And finally, it’s over, I go back to my desk and I’m just like, {sighs}. And then about 30 minutes later, deja vu all over again. So I went home after that.
Liz Patrick: You were not alone. The office got thin that afternoon.
Matt Michel: But to carry this further, a group decided they were going to go up there again, from the graphics team, and we had this British guy there who was a barbecue critic for the Dallas Observer. And I looked at everybody and I said, “Okay, I’ll pay for lunch if Gavin eats a Hell Slider.” And everybody pivots and stares at him instantly and he’s looking, “Oh, not fair.” And he ate one and then he wrote about it in the Dallas Observer. I think his opening line was, “Today I am a man.”
David Heimer: Well, also that was another disastrous attendee day. They came back, they all had some Hell Sliders, and basically, all of them went home early.
Matt Michel: So this is the hundredth podcast, right?
David Heimer: This is the 100th podcast.
Matt Michel: So you’ve done 100 of these and this is the first time you’ve ever asked me to be on one.
David Heimer: Yeah.
Matt Michel: So what gives?
Liz Patrick: Seriously?
David Heimer: Well, it’s because we’re leaving the company; it seemed like a good time to do it. I have certainly enjoyed working with you guys. It’s been a great joy. I look forward to the next adventures.
Matt Michel: I think I’d like to leave with one thing. When we interview somebody, I always make sure that I’m the last person to interview them. And the hiring decision has essentially been made by the time I get to someone, but I want to test the person just to do a gut check on them. And I’ve canceled a few of them this way but I also want them to understand the importance of what we do at Service Nation. Because our mission statement is that we “help service contractors improve their business and financial performance, leading to a profitable exit strategy.” That’s not just words on paper for us, it’s something that we internalize and something that we believe in and live. And it’s important for you to understand your role in the world because it’s not by accident or chance that you are considered essential services work. Because you’re the people that keep the lights on at night. You’re the people that make sure that our showers are hot and that our toilets flush and you’re the people that make sure our homes are cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and you’re the people that renovate and recondition our homes and businesses so that they’re more livable. What you do is really important and you deserve to live lives of prosperity and you deserve to have success. And don’t let anybody convince you otherwise. And take action so that you can generate the value and the wealth that you deserve and your family deserves. That’s my closing thoughts.
David Heimer: I can’t think we could possibly close on anything better. Thank you guys both for doing this, and that’s a wrap.
Outro: We’re always looking for good ideas and interviews for our podcast. 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. 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.