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Podcast #24

“Company Aquisition”

Featuring Mike Ritter

Intro: Welcome to Profiles In Prosperity with your host David Heimer.

David Heimer: Hi everybody, this is David Heimer, welcome to Profiles In Prosperity. Mike Ritter is the president and owner of Great Lakes, Heating Air Conditioning, Electrical, and Plumbing, in South Bend Indiana. Great lakes is well known for tremendous growth for their commitment to ethical business practices and for being a great place to work. One of the many things I particularly enjoy about Mike is that he’s an out-of-the-box thinker, always willing to consider and try new things. So about 18 months ago, I was particularly interested when Mike told me that he was doing his own recruiting event. So this was going to be a multi-hour event, held at their offices, promoted heavily in local media, including radio and TV. So the idea was to get as many people in there as possible and allow them to meet and be recruited by Mike and his team in person. So since Mike has had the Service Nation International Roundtable in New Orleans, as I am this week, I thought it’d be great to sit down with him, have him tell us more about his recruiting event, what the results were and what he learned. So Mike Ritter, welcome to Profiles In Prosperity. And thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Mike Ritter: Well, first off here we are a year later and I still have results rolling in from that single event I did at the end of March, 2017. So what I wanted to do is I want to be able to show the community what we’re doing and who we were about. So it was all about the culture and we set up four different stations and the people that came in would rotate, they’d spend 15 minutes at each station. Of course, I had to have my team involved and you know what? They’re getting to have a say in who they work with. So that also built my culture, reinforced what I wanted. So they would go from one station to the next. They had planned an hour for that. We had so many people show up for the event. I actually had to do an impromptu to an additional fifth station. We did stuff like shoot paintball guns, makeup sheet metal, dust pans. We played charades and anything that we had done in the last year in our training classes that we have every Tuesday and they all had a point behind them. Paintball for example, we shoot at, play pigeons. You never hit it the first time. Kind of like when you go into the customer and you offer them something, they might say no, but you don’t start shooting. You don’t stop asking for that.

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