Our core values are everywhere in the company and quite coincidentally, I have five core values and they are what drive me, the company and the culture here. And what makes us very unique, very different. And if there were going to be five rules of how I run business, those would be it. I mean, we could talk all day on KPIs and all the numbers that everybody takes for granted and assumes. But I think this is the extra stuff, the soft stuff that are unseen, sometimes unspoken or even not even identified rules that we all should embrace because I feel it takes you from good to great. It takes you to the next level of the identity of your company and the culture of your company.

David Heimer: So what’s number one?

Eric Dutton: Number one is be amazing, and that’s a broad statement and that starts, I mean, the simple things that can start with your technicians, making sure that they are in complete uniform. And I don’t mean just a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt tucked in. I want them to stand out. I want them to not just stand out in a bunch of plumbers. I want them to stand out in a room full of business professionals where they’re polished black shoes, black belts, unstained work pants that are clean pressed shirts tucked in ID badges, clean-shaven, as much as possible. We do allow facial hair, but you know, you have to be groomed and just looking the part. And I think more importantly is feeling the pride that they have being part of the brand is amazing that I interact with daily because we do outbound happy calls after every service call CSRs email those out a couple of times a day. And I get those and I read those that fuels me or reading online reviews. And that’s kind of where the rubber meets the road on the amazing part and just operating a hundred percent, not even good enough, you have to go to the next level, be ridiculous to the point when outsiders see it, they just don’t get it. That is the embodiment of amazing. At least my perception is anyway on that.

And number two, and I’m just going to order here and again, most companies, some have core values. And if you do great, if you don’t, I guess that’s okay too. I need a smarter guy. They need to tell you why they’re important. And then there’s companies that have like fifty core values. And I think that’s just people trying too hard. You can’t look at it, glance at it, and send it off the top of your head real quick; they’re not going to stick. You have to have core values people can get their head around and anyway, that’s kind of what we have. And the next one is ever-evolving, all change is good. And I’ve found in my career that anytime there’s change those nights where you stay awake at night because somebody quit or something happened, ultimately you ride that out. At the end of that bumpy ride, it got better. It actually was an improvement. And I feel a lot of us business owners and I’m not going to pick on the blue-collar industry, but you know, we all tend to be kind of redneck kind of, you know, guys, most of us start as workers and we have that. Not necessarily the most open-minded approach to things and change is always seen as a negative, nobody likes change.

Well, I feel, especially in modern times with fast pace that everything is, if you’re not ready to bob and weave, if you’re not ready to change, you are just going to be passed up or eaten up one or the other because you have to be ready to pivot and move. Otherwise, you’re at a total disadvantage and especially in our industry, it’s getting more and more sophisticated and you look at the players out there and I’m just so impressed at the other companies out there that I’m familiar with. And I’m sure there’s hundreds more I’m not familiar with, and people have their A game going. So part of that is being able to evolve, you know, kind of Charlie Greer says {inaudible 05:11} is evolve or die. And that is our second core value.

David Heimer: So every evolving, all change is good.

Eric Dutton: All change. And then I, at one point was thinking of modifying that to good, change is good and I’ll change does ultimately turn into good anyway, from my experience. And you know, it’s just, you can’t ignore it. You can’t pretend it’s not there, and a lot of us like to bear our heads in the sand and ignore the change. But it’s going to happen with you or without you, and you better get on board because the train is leaving the station. So you’ve ready to change with the times because it’s going to happen. And the third one, which I think is probably one of the more powerful ones. They are all powerful, so I don’t want to pick favorites, but family culture for better or worse. And what that means to me, you know, they all have these little twists to it, which we have a sense of humor here. So we always try to carry that through most of our messages and family culture {cross talk 06:06}.

David Heimer: That one has an element of humor to it, you’re right.

Eric Dutton: It does. And you know, because we all always remember, you know, family gatherings, where you got the drunk uncle, you got the guy who parked on the lawn and it’s just part of the color of the company. There’s some companies, I won’t mention the names that I know and actually, they’re very military. It’s like everybody’s going to have clean-shaven, flattop haircuts, and you know, at attention, and be inhuman, cold, sterile, and super professional. And that’s great, except I think what you’re doing there with your customers, especially you’re turning yourself into a commodity and taking the emotion, which we’re all driven by emotion, we’re emotional beings. So that family culture starts within people who feel connected to the brand, connected to the managers, the owner, and then they, people will do business with people they like.

And if you want somebody to do what you want in the field at the level you want it, you can create rules and regulations and force them to do it and try to catch them not doing it and punish them for it. Or you can get them to buy in and feel the emotion of it and get passionate about it like you do and it happens automatically. And I’m so blessed that I have such a staff, I read the reviews and I just get excited. People are floored. People are amazed. Ultimately too, that then transfers into the customer base. So our entire marketing message at this company is our slogan, the plumber you send to your mom’s house. And when we do our branding, which is a lot of radio, there is always fun banter interaction between myself and my mother kind of, you know, stage phone calls to the company and me answering it. And it’s very fun, really cool stuff, and creates a relationship.

David Heimer: I listen to that sometimes.

Eric Dutton: I believe they’re all on YouTube, I believe is where they’re accessible, even though they’re not videos. But you know, we have dozens of them and we have customers constantly referencing them and wanting to know about mom and asking questions about that. But you bring them into the emotion of the company and allowing them to hear that and we have very little selling on that stuff. And I think a lot of us fall into that trap of, if we’re going to put out a message, that’s going to say half off, buy one, get one free, act now. Now, you know, all that is just white noise in the background because people hear it all the time from everybody. I would rather use that time to build a relationship and create that continuity and just create that rapport with the listeners because all the advertising in the world cannot break plumbing. But they remember you when it does break, they’re going to want to call Dutton Plumbing because that was the company. They know they have a relationship. They hear it every morning on the way to work and every night on the way home, when they listen to the radio. I feel if you can corporate that family culture throughout your company, and then have it go into your customer base, it’s all good after that.

It just has paid dividends for us and repeat customers close to 80%, 70 to 80% turn customers. And it’s the only thing that works better than that is just good service. You go out there to the same people, you take care of them and treat them like family. That’s one of the things that we do really well. We have employees with habits and showing up late and we have you know, like I say, personal drama that happens and we have to support that and that spreads into our customers as well. We all love to go to that customer who spends $5,000 and we love those customers. But we also go to these customers who are in need, maybe a senior citizen on a fixed income, that has a bad situation, with no way of paying for it. And I think that’s where we then need to step up and take ownership of that and get them up and running.

Don’t be there for the money, be there for the customer. Take care of your family, create that with your customers, with your employees. And I don’t mean going out, doing free plumbing all the time, but our guys have leeway. If they identify a situation, somebody in need, they’re empowered to take care of that customer. And I never second guess it, and it’s never worked against us and it feels good to do that and we like to give back that way. So we don’t do it for airtime. We don’t do it for an article written up. In fact, we’re really bad at getting publicity for stuff like that. So at this point we’ve never gotten publicity for any of the work that we donate to people. We just do it. And I think the internal publicity we get from the heart that our guys are part of that. And they feel the love of that is more powerful than any marketing message we would harvest off of that. And kind of maybe even cheapen it a little bit, you know? Yeah. I’ll take the publicity of it if it happens organically, but I’m not going to chase it. I wouldn’t dirty it that way.

David Heimer: What goes around comes around when you dish out good, good tends to come back to you doesn’t it?

Eric Dutton: I do agree 100% and then moving on our fourth is professional, but not perfect. And that’s, you know, and again, a little humor there. What I’m saying there is that when you go back to amazing, that’s us being professional, I mean professional, but it’s also part of that amazing how it ties into this core value is perfection is not required to be amazing. In fact, when we’re with a customer, we screw up. Yeah, we do and maybe we burp or something, or maybe we drop something or we scratch their floor or whatever things happen. We back into their car, that’s happened oops, sorry about that. We’re professional. We’re not perfect. You know, and we embrace that where we don’t want to be that sterile, emotionless face at the door, a robot. We want to be that guy who’s quirky, maybe who’s got his personal style and it may not be the most professional. You know, I look at our guys, I’ve got a great team, they’re on our website. We have everybody there, but you’ll look at them and not the prettiest guys. Right. I mean, we’re plumbers and you know, it’s, okay.

Perfection is not required because nobody’s perfect. And the people that pretend they are being frauds, we know that. And I think customers appreciate that, that you embrace your uniqueness and your flaws because we all have them. And I think we all love it when people point it out about themselves because it makes them more human and we can identify because I’m not perfect. And I sure hate being around people that are, you know, because most of them are in denial.

David Heimer: They’re annoying.

Eric Dutton: Yes, because it’s not even true. They think they’re perfect and they’re not. And the ones that will not admit fault, I just don’t feel comfortable around that. And honestly, trying to impress what, what wall are you building for what reason? And I think we encourage people to be themselves and you know what, it’s great because it shows. Our customers love our individual employees from our sales staff all the way down to our level one installers, we get reviews and compliments constantly. And it’s all about something personal, it’s not always about the work, it’s about something he said or something he did. And it’s just that special twist that people bring to it. And it’s not about being perfect, it’s about being yourself. And I think that’s how that translates for us.

David Heimer: Yep. That’s a good one and funny.

Eric Dutton: Yeah, well we also have humor and then the last one is three letters, G S D and it stands for Get Crap Done. Let’s say get, get stuff done, GSD somewhat efficiently. Okay. And you know, I’ve had people comment or coach me on my core values and how it should say GSD at the highest level and professional, always unwavering and family culture and getting all these strong words. But you know, me, Dave, that’s not me. I’m a person and I think we all are. So when we say we get stuff done, we do. We’re a company of trigger pullers. One of the things that we all suffer from as we overanalyze and paralysis by analysis, and I’ve always been the guy who says what, sure, let’s try it.

You know, what is the worst case scenario? It doesn’t work. And the best way to find out if something isn’t going to work is just to do it, fail, get over it and move forward. And you can do that in much less time than dwelling on it and sitting still. So any backslide you might take from that mistake, first of all, it’s a lesson you won’t ever forget. And I guarantee it clears the board for the next project. You don’t have it sit there, lingering in the back of your head. Tony Robbins talks about that as well, about how do you find out you just do it and we’ve always done that and have we made mistakes? Absolutely. But then we go back to our ever evolving or we’re ready to switch it up and try something new. And so these, these core values, and that was the fifth one and all five of these just kind of interact and work with each other as sort of a dynamic list that is constantly evolving, kind of like the second one ever evolving.

So it’s kind of exciting. And these core values that took a while to build because we started with a big list and we’ve gone over it and over, and I’ll never forget the day that Eric Falcon and I, we finally filtered it down to these. I remember where I was. I remember the time of day and it’s burned into my brain as a permanent memory because it was emotional for me. I felt this connect to who I am, so it now connects to my company and it’s genuine. And I think it’s so important that these core values and any of us who have core values really do ones that matter to you and what you want your team to see and feel and let go of that big, long, stupid list of politically correct buzzwords that everybody has hanging on their office, walls, integrity and honesty. And sure, we assume that right, but that’s the five rules I got and they’re all about emotion and they’re all about that invisible, soft thing rule, not something that’s easy to measure. But stuff that pays off and it adds to everything else you do.

David Heimer: It’s interesting you said how these connect with you because as you were going through them, I was thinking about how you embody these goals. You know, frankly, I think you are an amazing person. You’re clearly a person that has always been willing to try almost anything. And I mean that in a right way, you endorse change and you’re not afraid of change. And then family culture, you’ve always been about family from the first time that I met you. You had family stories for me and talked about how you feel about the people that you work with and how you’re close to them and how you think about them and worry about them. And it is just like a family professional, but not perfect. That’s sort of the humor that you bring to things and then getting stuff done somewhat efficiently that also describes you. So it’s great, the fabulous list. I kind of believe that people in your company identify very well with its great stuff.

Eric Dutton: Like any company, as we grow and evolve and gone through a lot of changes and the last couple of years, a lot of staff rotation, and that happens with the growth I think. The people that stick and get behind it, or the people would have these values and it’s up to us as the leaders to really translate these and push these down or up or sideways to our staff so they feel it. And that’s a tough one too; I’ll tell you when we get caught up in our day to day, and we’re looking at balance sheets and, or trying to do this, that, and the other, we lose touch with us sometimes. So it’s very important that we revisit that. And like I said, we’ve probably got thirty of these hanging throughout the company. Pretty much every room has one or two in it, so people can just be exposed to it and then I do my best to live it. That’s I think the best endorsement of the core values.

David Heimer: Alright Eric, thank you so much for doing this. I knew it would be great. It’ll be another very popular podcast. I’m sure it’s stuff that people can take and think about, and really use in their businesses. It’s very nice of you to be willing to share it with everyone.

Eric Dutton: You’re welcome and thank you, David.

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