Summary

John Akhoian, the founder of Rooter Hero Plumbing, shares his journey of starting and growing his plumbing and HVAC company through acquisitions and rapid expansion. He discusses the strategy behind acquiring other companies, the importance of targeting specific demographics, and the challenges of managing multiple locations. John also highlights the equity packages offered to employees and the goal of creating 100 millionaires within the company. Overall, Rooter Hero Plumbing focuses on providing excellent customer service and creating a positive work environment for its employees.

Takeaways

Rooter Hero Plumbing has experienced rapid growth through acquisitions and strategic expansion.
The company focuses on targeting specific demographics and providing excellent customer service.
Rooter Hero Plumbing offers equity packages to employees and aims to create 100 millionaires within the company.
The founder emphasizes the importance of mentorship and networking for personal and professional growth.

 

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Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:01.008)
Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. Today my guest is John Okoyan. He is from Router Hero, excuse me, Router Hero, and he's made two company HVAC acquisitions and now he's on a couple tuck-ins and now he's on a rapid growth in Southern California of Router Hero. Welcome to the show, John.

John Akhoian (00:22.818)
Thank you. Thanks, John. Good to be on your show.

Jon Stoddard (00:25.42)
Yeah, so I've got to ask you about this. Looks like you started Rooter Hero back in 2011. What were you doing before that?

John Akhoian (00:34.226)
So I was an owner, I've been a plumber since I was 17 years old. So I've been in the trades for a long time. I had several plumbing companies and right around before opening it, right around the time of opening it, I owned some franchises. I was a franchisee actually, one of the largest franchisees in the space. And eventually sold my franchises and

bought myself out of some non-competes and opened up Rooter Hero Plumbing. And now it's Rooter Hero Plumbing and Air.

Jon Stoddard (01:09.1)
Yeah, and knew the name, Router Hero. You made up the, created the name?

John Akhoian (01:14.422)
Yeah, you know, I had a co-founder who's retired now that helped me and I always like the hero name. So we quickly went and trademarked the term hero in home services and got the trademark on plumbing, drain cleaning, HVAC and electrical. And then, you know, just figured we're in the drain cleaning space. So router hero plumbing is probably the best way to start. And then eventually we'll get into.

other trades which we have now.

Jon Stoddard (01:46.852)
Let me ask you about these, how you started out. Now you have companies in offices all the way to Phoenix, 250 trucks. Is that right? Yeah.

John Akhoian (01:58.494)
Yeah, a little more now. I think we're like in the three and a quarter mark now.

Jon Stoddard (02:05.168)
Fantastic. And when you restarted this, did you have a specific niche you were going after and say, hey, we're not going to do all of this stuff. We're just going to do drain cleaning? And then you had to do the drain cleaning.

John Akhoian (02:18.83)
That was specifically how we started. Yeah, it was primarily drain cleaning and plumbing service for residential homes. So that was our small niche. It was like residential owner occupied homeowners that have problems with drains. And so majority of our mix was about a 70, 30. We had 70% drains and 30% plumbing. And now the mix is, we have drains, plumbing and some HVAC work as well.

Jon Stoddard (02:25.742)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (02:49.2)
So you do vents cleaning also.

John Akhoian (02:49.498)
that we do. Yeah, we do we do cleaning, we do installation, we do service, we have warranty, you know, maintenance programs as well.

Jon Stoddard (03:00.512)
Yeah. And then fast forward, you purchased a company called Specialty Contracting Group. Is that the first one or is that the second?

John Akhoian (03:12.296)
Oh, you know, I think that was like a that was a group that was going out of business. We actually just purchased their phone numbers and kind of tucked it into one of our branches.

Jon Stoddard (03:25.436)
Oh, I got you. So it was just a kind of an asset purchase with phone numbers that you just took over. Yeah. Right. Why were they going out of business? What was the story on that?

John Akhoian (03:29.13)
Yeah, sort of, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, I, you know, if it's the group I'm remembering, you know, it was a, it was a fund. It was sort of like a fund group that went into purchasing several HVAC and plumbing operations. And they just had bad management and, you know, they didn't know how to run a plumbing company. They didn't know how to run HVAC company. So it just, you know, wrong, wrong fit type of people. And then they really didn't know any better. So.

management that was currently there, they kind of, you know, like didn't allow them to do certain things and the company eventually started losing a lot of money. So they were ready to get out.

Jon Stoddard (04:13.696)
Yeah, buy the assets. You purchased CanDo plumbing in 2023. What was that? How big was that?

John Akhoian (04:22.218)
That was a small company and that was also an asset purchase. Owner of the company did something weird, sort of like sold the rights to the name to somebody and then was still leasing it back. You know, small five truck operation and he used to work for us. So we ended up getting him out of some debt that he was in and now he's running under one of our divisions as a field manager.

Jon Stoddard (04:51.18)
Yeah. That wasn't really something strategic on your path. Was it a target of opportunity that just came along or?

John Akhoian (04:58.39)
We just wanted to help him out. He was just kind of, uh, you know, in a situation where, you know, the company wasn't going to grow the, the name didn't even belong to him anymore because he sold the rights to the name. So it was a weird scenario. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (05:10.96)
That's odd. I gotta tell you, that sounds odd. Yeah.

Yeah, and what else did you acquire as a roll-up?

John Akhoian (05:19.17)
So we got, yeah, we had a couple of small HVAC companies that got us into the HVAC business up in Northern California and one in Southern California. And we've tucked that into our branches as well. And now we have a mix of HVAC service that we do as well. I am looking right now, we're opening up a Greenfield operations in Northern California, another one. We opened one up last year, we're opening up another one.

you know, next week I'm actually going to be up there. And we have a couple of green fields that we're doing in Arizona and Nevada as well. So, yeah, I mean, we're just, you know, going in and a lot of it is happening with our own staff. I mean, we have great people that want to, you know, continue to grow. And we offer equity packages for our management team. So a lot of them are growing within the.

Jon Stoddard (05:58.473)
Phoenix is growing like crazy.

Jon Stoddard (06:13.452)
Yeah, tell me. So you got a whole bunch of locations. How many locations now? 15?

John Akhoian (06:19.71)
We have, well we kind of, we had about, we had about 13 and then we combined some locations. So we're at 10 locations. We'll be at 11 by the end of the year. And then we have a couple we're going to open up next year, early on into the year. So we'll be back up to 13.

Jon Stoddard (06:38.604)
Yeah, and what is each location kind of average? Now this is all a private business, right? I'm not expecting you to hit.

John Akhoian (06:44.798)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, our average location, you know, we have locations that do 20 million plus in revenue. We have locations that do five million plus in revenue. So I'd say the average is at around 10. You know, but.

Jon Stoddard (06:58.892)
Yeah. Where's the 20 million revenue? What kind of location demographics do you serve?

John Akhoian (07:04.766)
I mean, the demographics are all over. I mean, we have demographics of, you know, like either they're combined. We have a couple in Northern California. We have some in Southern California and it's just the matter of, you know, like putting the team together. And a lot of it is just putting marketing dollars towards it and then acquiring and putting together the teams that are out there. The local management usually plans their own growth. So we help them budget.

Jon Stoddard (07:25.496)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (07:34.602)
whatever they need, and then we provide all the assets that are necessary and the support as well to help the local management grow the divisions they're running.

Jon Stoddard (07:45.12)
And is that from zero or is that making an acquisition of existing kind of

John Akhoian (07:49.842)
Oh no, we've had locations that went from zero to 20 million in like three to five years. So yeah, I mean, it's some of us all of it is. We don't have one there. We used to we sold it. Our non competes are up this coming year. So we're opening one up in Tucson as well.

Jon Stoddard (07:57.136)
Do you have a location in Tucson?

Jon Stoddard (08:08.888)
Yeah, I got a guy looking for to do this. He's been trying to buy an HVAC plumbing service based business. So he's, he's run one before, so I should connect you with him. Yeah.

John Akhoian (08:17.654)
Okay.

Awesome, yeah. Yeah, connect me with you. Well, we'll be there soon, so we'll be there by February next year.

Jon Stoddard (08:26.856)
Oh, interesting. That's cool. So what are the assets that you bring that you get from zero to $20 million? Like that really, I mean, because somebody in LA, is it a different message than somebody in Tucson or Phoenix? Or is it just the same, same?

John Akhoian (08:41.166)
No, really, I mean, yeah, same message, same type of people, same needs they have. I mean, we look for, you know, obviously, you know, areas which have older homes that, you know, start having more problems, you know, new communities like, you know, communities that just develop, you know, typically takes about anywhere from, you know, depending on how quickly they built the communities, anywhere from eight to 12 years before they start having problems.

So we look for older aging communities of plumbing and homes. We look for, you know,

Jon Stoddard (09:17.712)
What, when you, when it, uh, what kind of, I mean, what does that look like? Those metrics look like you're talking about 1950s house or 1970s or eighties.

John Akhoian (09:26.902)
Yeah, it could be 80s. It could be 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. You know, even homes built in the 90s now are, you know, starting to have some, you know, issues with plumbing and HVAC. So, you know, even 2000. So we're looking at 20 years plus, you know, sort of average owner. And then we look for more dense areas that have owner occupied homes, not like people that have homes that have rented or anything like that.

Jon Stoddard (09:45.978)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (09:55.114)
And then based on that, we look at some of the average household incomes, things like that. We look and see what the competition looks like over there that it's really not that important. But we like it when there's bigger companies in the market. It just kind of shows that there is large potential in those areas. And then we just go in there and we start with the greenfield. We start with a plan.

We get the right type of management in place and then we have management training programs. We have a lot of our divisions that network with one another. We have regional VPs that actually go there, help them sort of like open up the location, work on the location, get all the training in the locations done and everything else. And internally, we have sort of a hub and spoke type of company.

So we have our main office that where we have a call center, we have marketing, we have legal, we have HR, we have accounting or CFOs there. So we have a huge infrastructure that helps support all of these locations. And in the locations, we are mainly forward-facing, customer-facing. So whatever has to do with, you know, helping the customer get service. So we have, in some locations, we have dispatchers.

in most locations, it's mainly technicians, management team, some field support, install manager, you know, stuff like that.

Jon Stoddard (11:26.564)
Yeah. So these are not franchises, these separate locations. These are whole, uh, subsidiaries or LLCs of the holding company, or what does that structure look like?

John Akhoian (11:38.378)
Yeah, yeah, it's typically just a holding company. A lot of the operating facilities are regionally based and operated. So if we have a, you know, Northern California might be its own region. And and a lot of those companies are operated regionally. So there's a manager, there's like a VP that's, you know, sort of overlooking that region. And then we have individual offices where we have brick and mortar, where the trucks come and park and.

You know, we have equipment and warehouse and stuff like that. And that's where we basically employ our teams that forward face the customer out of.

Jon Stoddard (12:17.744)
Yeah. And what's the, tell me how many trucks do you need and people you need to create a million dollars?

John Akhoian (12:26.108)
million dollars a year.

Jon Stoddard (12:27.524)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (12:29.602)
Oh, not many, maybe a handful. You know, yeah.

Jon Stoddard (12:31.972)
Just a handful. And what do you look to do? You have each goal of $5 million or $20 million, or does it make sense to look for somebody that can only get a million dollars out of the business?

John Akhoian (12:40.29)
I mean, we're going.

John Akhoian (12:45.514)
I mean, we go deep and we go wide. We don't try only to go wide. So a lot of times when we start a location, we don't really need too many top heavy management in place. We typically do it with maybe a field manager, one person in the office. We call it a logistics coordinator that sort of handles the paperwork that goes back and forth between corporate and that location.

And basically just an office where we can keep some equipment and a truck and the trucks come. And then that's where we have our Zoom meetings because we use technology to meet up. Like tomorrow, we have an all-hands meeting with all of our field staff. It'll all be done by Zoom. They'll all be in their headquarter offices. And that's basically what we use to.

communicate back with our staff, train them. We have local trainers as well, where they'll do the hands-on work and everything else. But for the most part, we're very much using Zoom and we're using all kinds of technology to try to communicate.

Jon Stoddard (13:55.544)
Yeah. What's the goal for this? Where do you want to go? Are you talking about building a 50, 100, you know, location? And what's your model? Cause it sounds like what you're trying to do is something like discount tire does is, you know, they give equity to the owners and it's a great model. They're producing, you know, per square footage, tons of money. And people love working there.

John Akhoian (14:21.142)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's basically similar to what we're doing. Yeah, we have, you know, locations, you know, just like discount tire, like you mentioned, we have management that run it. But we do have the headquarters that supports the, you know, field operations.

Jon Stoddard (14:39.116)
Yeah, and it's very, the ads are very much the same everywhere you go. Yeah. So tell me about this equity that you offer in the owner. What does that look like? I mean, what can he do with equity? Yeah.

John Akhoian (14:48.502)
Well, it's, so, you know, there's a short term and long term incentive, you know, so if we, you know, we have this, this goal where, you know, we, we want to get where we want to get to as a company within the next three to five years. And when everybody gets there, you know, there's a equity package for the manager that runs that store for the key employees that are there. And also for, you know, a lot of the.

corporate staff as well that's there. So everybody is pulling in the same direction. Short-term wise, we have key performance indicators that we help them achieve, which is based on average tickets, close rates, conversion rates, gross profits, marketing costs. We call it S to R ratios. There's all these key performance indicators that they get short-term incentives on. And then the long-term incentive is

you know, stock in the company. And if we ever do, you know, we're privately held right now, but if we ever do a event where, you know, we sell to private equity, they have stock, they could cash it, it's just as good as gold.

Jon Stoddard (15:59.852)
Yeah. Is that the goal? At some point you have an exit to Prevy? Yeah.

John Akhoian (16:04.123)
Eventually, we'll bring partners in to help us leverage the company to the next level. Right now, we funded our own growth and we have the capability to keep doing that. So we're going to continue to do that, but eventually we'll look for a partner to help our managers and key employees cash in some of their stock and also to help take it to the next level as well.

Jon Stoddard (16:30.884)
Yeah. Well, tell, give me the example. If you were going to set up a location in Tucson, Arizona and you, you get an office, do you need to find somebody to run it? And then do you fund all the, you get the trucks out there, you paint the trucks, you get all the equipment because HVAC cleaning vents is a lot different than plumbing cleaning pipes.

John Akhoian (16:55.806)
Yeah, well we start out with plumbing, that's our core business, drain cleaning and plumbing. And when the business gets to a certain point, we add the HVAC on top of it. So using Tucson as a model, we'll go in there, either acquire a small company or a mid-size company or a platform company, the company that's already there. Look at the local leadership, if the local leadership has the capability, we train them.

Jon Stoddard (16:59.617)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (17:25.642)
We leverage, a lot of times we have to go and redo the trucks because we like giving our techs new trucks and we wrap them a certain way.

Jon Stoddard (17:35.832)
You give them brand new trucks, not, you know, 10, five, 10 years old. Okay.

John Akhoian (17:40.33)
Yeah, brand new. Yeah, everything we do. So we actually fund the business growth. Yeah, we put the money in, we make the business forward-facing, look good to the customer, our standard brand, which our guys are uniformed, our trucks are a certain way, all of our trucks are upfitted the same way we use the same type of equipment. We train them on that. And then we just go to market. And a lot of times, if we...

have the right leader in place. We could grow that place pretty quickly to becoming one of the larger companies there. So it's all leadership based and we do put the time and invest into the growth of the leader. But at the end of the day, we believe in entrepreneurs, guys that come in and are good at working in a structured environment.

and then we give them the support they need to help leverage and grow that market.

Jon Stoddard (18:41.92)
And what do you guys charge? Is it you charge more than the average or competitive to get the upsell? Or let me just talk to you about that because of the unit level economics. You know, usually there's a forced tool to keep good employees from the entrepreneur, fair wages, excellent benefits, retirement options, and opportunities for growth. Right? To do that, you have to charge a little bit more.

to do that. Is that the case with Rooter or Hero?

John Akhoian (19:17.918)
We're not the cheapest in the market, yes. I mean, we do, you know, but we're not the most expensive either. We look at the win-win all the way around, you know. Customer has to win, our people have to win, and with that, the company ends up winning as well.

Jon Stoddard (19:20.558)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (19:37.42)
Yeah. And what do you, when you come to a new market, let's say it's starting from two options. So one is starting from zero. What do you need to spend to get to a point where you're profitable with the right management, right people?

John Akhoian (19:50.802)
It's different in every market and I really have to look that up and look at the averages. But it all depends on the market, it all depends on the penetration of that market, how competitive the market is. That'll tell us how long it's going to take. And a lot of times there's an average, but I just don't have that answer right now.

Jon Stoddard (20:11.916)
Yeah. You know, we're living in Tucson, so we need the AC. It's 360 days out of the year. When you guys go look at a market to purchase, how do you find these people? Do you just reach out, reach cold and just start this relationship? Or you look for on market or on off market deals? And how do you buy like fair price or I got to have it because it's within our plans and pay a little bit more.

John Akhoian (20:17.131)
Yeah, for sure, yeah.

John Akhoian (20:42.702)
So a little bit of all of it, right? It's not one or the other. Every one of it is unique to itself. We take a look at a lot of different things and a lot of times it all depends. So we have an acquisition team here. There's three people that are on it that are actively reaching out to companies and my pipeline is pretty full with opportunities that just hit my desk every day.

We basically go through those opportunities, we meet with the owner, and we see what their goals are. If their goals are retirement, we look at, how can we help this owner retire? If their goals are, I'm stuck and I wanna build this business to the next level, we look and see what we need to do as a company to provide the resources to help that person grow to the next level.

Jon Stoddard (21:39.46)
Yeah. And what does that look like for somebody running those businesses? When you say, I know the equity is kind of hold off. It really doesn't mean anything till there's an exit event, but how do you guys pay your people? Are they richly rewarded or competitive at the market? What does that look like?

John Akhoian (22:01.722)
I think we have one of the best pay plans that are out there because it's very much self-driven where it means that whoever the individual is and how quickly they can actually recruit, train, help get the field staff in place, they can make a lot more because we look at it and we do quarterly reviews.

And the quicker that division grows, both with gross sales, gross profit, net sales, the quicker it can go.

Jon Stoddard (22:38.448)
Do they get paid on moving up that metric ladder, KPI ladder? Yeah. And it's profit shares? Or profit?

John Akhoian (22:42.482)
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, they get rewarded. It's it's both salary, it's bonuses and it's profit shares. Yeah, it's all three combined.

Jon Stoddard (22:51.992)
Yeah. And when I got to ask you with this acquisition team, now, how do you guys buy? Is it just funding out of your cash flow or do you have to go outside the private equity and borrow some money or something?

John Akhoian (23:05.614)
Well, we haven't had the need to do that. So we've funded it all through our own company funds.

Jon Stoddard (23:14.305)
Yeah. Curious, what do you offer somebody? It's like they've been running a business for 15 years in Tucson. A lot of businesses here are pretty old. They're 20, 25 years old and it may be on the second owner. What does that kind of offer look like? I mean, do you give them a 50% down in cash, 50% seller financing? What does that usually look like?

Hey, this is, this is how we buy.

John Akhoian (23:45.334)
Yeah, I mean, you know, we have a way we buy it's based off of, you know, looking at the company's earnings and it's a multiple of earnings. A lot of these companies really don't have earnings, you know, they have assets. So we take a look at, you know, is this a lifestyle business for the owner? Is that kind of what they're running? If it's a lifestyle business, that's only providing the lifestyle they need. Um, and we look at, you know, what does.

What does the earnings look like and what does it look like when the business is converted? We had businesses where not only the owner, but all the employees wanted to retire. Yeah, so we look at that and go, okay, well, what are we really buying? We're buying trucks, we're buying equipment, and we're buying maybe a database of customers that may or may not use us, right? So...

Jon Stoddard (24:27.088)
That sounds dangerous.

John Akhoian (24:42.774)
because they're so used to the owner. And then we look at the, how's that business priced? Okay, are they the lowest price provider in that area? If they are, and you know, we go into the market with our pricing, most likely those customers will go away. Right, so we take into account all of that stuff. So when I say no two businesses look alike, I mean, I really mean it because they're just all over the place. You know, some of the...

Jon Stoddard (25:08.764)
Yeah, we've looked at some of my businesses in Tucson and they really boost the SDE up and that's not really the real cash flow.

John Akhoian (25:19.85)
Yeah, exactly. It really isn't. And then they use so many of the ad backs that, you know, sort of like, you know, adding back my salary. But well, we're going to have to pay somebody to run the business, right? So and typically that's, you know, all of the profit of the business, right? So well, if you're adding back your salary and not have to pay, you know, somebody to run the business, but you're leaving, then there really isn't an EBITDA there for us to do a multiple on. So then we look at it and say,

Jon Stoddard (25:21.324)
Yeah. Well...

Jon Stoddard (25:37.134)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (25:49.482)
Okay, well in this scenario, what can we value here? Is it the customer base? Is it the vehicles and equipment? What is it that has value that we can, and is it a business that fits our model? Because a lot of times, a lot of these businesses are heavily commercial-based or new construction-based, and if they are, it doesn't really fit our model. So if it doesn't fit our model,

Jon Stoddard (26:15.724)
You're not, you're not, uh, you know, there's residential and there's commercial or you're more residential than commercial.

John Akhoian (26:23.93)
We're residential, yeah, we're COD type of company. We finish the work, customers pay us. We do financing, so we're more geared to residential homeowners.

Jon Stoddard (26:33.744)
Yeah. What is your biggest challenge in doing this? Like what's your roadblocks? Like I'd like to accomplish this goal in here. This is my biggest challenges.

John Akhoian (26:44.63)
Well, I mean, really the biggest challenges are leveraging my time, my team's time, so that we're concentrating on the right areas. You know, we're working on proactive opportunities rather than reacting to climate changes or whatever is going on. So I think a lot of it is internal. You know, it's like if we focus.

Jon Stoddard (26:56.975)
Yeah.

John Akhoian (27:13.842)
our efforts and time in the right area and take the risks that we're looking to take to reap the rewards that lie in the future. It's just taking those right risks and making sure time and attention is put in the right place.

Jon Stoddard (27:27.724)
Yeah, the problem is you have too many opportunities. How do you do that?

John Akhoian (27:31.294)
There is a lot. I mean, I've had to say no more than yes. You know, like, so there's just so many. And then it's, you know, how much time are we spending going down this rabbit hole with the wrong opportunity? Right. And what does that take you away from?

Jon Stoddard (27:43.34)
Right, right, and be able to.

Jon Stoddard (27:47.696)
something really good, this shiny object. Now, how do you do that? I mean, who do you go to see for, who do you follow for mentors or mastermind groups? What do you do to sharpen that sword?

John Akhoian (28:00.014)
Well, I have a couple of groups. I have an industry group that we're actually putting together right now, which is larger companies that are privately owned with owners that we meet on a weekly basis. We do financial comparisons and stuff. And then I have a local group that are entrepreneurs that I meet with once a month. And then I do a quarterly meeting as well with a different group. And this is more for strategic planning.

you know, goal setting, working on the right stuff, asking the right questions. So there's a few groups I meet with, all of them are designed to do something different. My industry group makes me better in the industry because we compare a lot of business challenges, you know, that we have, and they're very specific to the industry. And then I have my...

Jon Stoddard (28:53.622)
What are those? Cause I, you know, aside from, hey, just raise your prices. What's after that? Yeah.

John Akhoian (29:00.426)
I mean, you know, it's not just raise your prices. It's also like looking and going, hey, what are you doing when you have these problems and how are you addressing it and then learning out of a group format? Because, you know, as human beings, we a lot of times, I mean, yeah, we, we create things, but a lot of the creations we create are repackaged from somebody else's creation, right? So looking at what others are doing and what's working for them.

and then talking about what we're doing. And so it's more of a give and take relationship. And an example of that could be like, you know, looking at, you know, what we're spending on materials compared to one another company like us and what they're doing in order to, you know, like spend less on materials, right? And they might have strategic, or we might have a buying power situation where we combine and we're like,

Jon Stoddard (29:53.144)
Yeah, well...

John Akhoian (29:58.966)
Why don't we just go and buy that together? Because we can leverage a lot more with all of our buying powers instead of one person's, right?

Jon Stoddard (30:06.104)
Yeah, so you got a group buying when you go to, is it equipment that you buy or do you actually replace HVAC systems?

John Akhoian (30:12.822)
What man, systems, it could be finance rates, you know, as a group, if we come in there with a half a billion dollars of financing, you know, we get better rates on.

Jon Stoddard (30:24.528)
Yes you will. You only get single digits if you go to Wall Street, guys.

John Akhoian (30:29.834)
Yeah, I mean, and looking at, for example, what am I paying for credit card fees and what are you paying? You know, let's take a look at that. Let's get all three of our numbers together and let's see if, you know, if we go out to market to search for better, you know, rates on, you know, credit card fees, what's that look like? So there's just all of this stuff. And then besides that, you know, meeting with one another, going to their operations, interviewing their staff and learning about what they're doing.

You know, there's just a lot of power in networking relationships.

Jon Stoddard (31:04.492)
Yeah. Let me ask you about people and what's your turnover with a router.

John Akhoian (31:11.806)
It depends on what position. You know, it could go anywhere from 5% to 100%. We have recently put together a new position at the company, which is an onboarding and training coordinator. And their bonuses and stats are all based off of lower, you know, increasing the retention and decreasing the turnover in our staff.

Jon Stoddard (31:40.141)
Right.

John Akhoian (31:40.494)
So that person is making strides and efforts towards that right now, working with our local management team, putting together programs and things like that.

Jon Stoddard (31:49.165)
Yeah. Why, 100% why, why does, why do people leave in the industry?

John Akhoian (31:54.238)
It depends on the role. I mean, it's you know, if you have like a yeah, we noticed certain roles have more turnover and it depends on what the role is.

Jon Stoddard (32:04.068)
Is that, let me guess, it's the roll that goes out to the end and cleans the rotors and is that high turn-off?

John Akhoian (32:10.922)
Yeah, I mean the more grunt work type of roles that are more... sort of if we don't grow our staff fast enough, we notice a turnover. So you got to grow them fast enough so they could take on another role. So having that plan exactly for them to go from one to the next and then...

Jon Stoddard (32:31.008)
Upward mobility, yeah.

John Akhoian (32:36.566)
You know, that really makes a big difference and having somebody track those numbers and seeing when people are starting roles of being, for example, a laborer and a ditch digger, right? To becoming a technician, because if those guys are doing it too long, I mean, it's just, you know, it gets really hard to keep in that role for several years without any advancement.

Jon Stoddard (33:00.272)
How do you pick people to hire that you're closer network? Like, what do you look for?

John Akhoian (33:08.622)
So we look for a good attitude. That's first and foremost. We look for somebody that can get a driver license, right? Because a lot of times they have to drive. So there are certain things that we look for that are just low level stuff, like just having the proper documents, having the, being able to drive, not having DUIs and stuff that are not insurable. So once we get through that, so it's almost like a funnel.

Jon Stoddard (33:12.417)
Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (33:17.4)
That's minimum, yeah. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (33:34.36)
Right, right, right.

John Akhoian (33:38.314)
You know, we take them all the way through the funnel and then we look at, it depends on what the role is. So we have on our careers page that pretty much highly defined. You know, what the potential earnings is, you know, what we're looking for in a person and when we're hiring them, we have them go through that and if they fit that role, then we bring them in for that role.

Jon Stoddard (34:04.972)
Yeah. When you say good attitude, what's a good attitude? A positive outlook on life. That's what I see, but what else?

John Akhoian (34:11.603)
Yeah, and also, you know, like just being good with people, you know, I mean, we're like a service oriented company. We don't, you know, we don't make widgets in a warehouse, right? We actually, yeah, we're customer interface. So, you know, having somebody that smiles is polite, you know, somebody you would welcome in your home, right?

Jon Stoddard (34:22.316)
or you never see interface, yeah.

John Akhoian (34:36.682)
That's what we look for because these are the kind of people I want in my house. So I'm sure they're the same type of people you want in your house. Somebody that doesn't have a criminal record, somebody that is not going to take advantage of people, someone that's going to be nice to people, someone that's going to be polite, open the door for customers. We have something that we call memorable experience that we do on every single service.

doing something memorable for the customer, something other than what they're paying us for.

Jon Stoddard (35:07.728)
Yeah. Do they get compensated a bonus from those?

John Akhoian (35:12.598)
Yeah, the better they perform, the better they get compensated for sure. Yeah.

Jon Stoddard (35:16.816)
Yeah, interesting. Well, what would somebody make if they were a technician and Tucson, Arizona going out and cleaning, whether it's plumbing or HVAC?

John Akhoian (35:29.806)
We have in a technician role as a... So we have on technicians, I think the pay is between 85 and 150, 150,000. We have field manager roles that make up to three, 400,000 a year. We have lower level like installers. Installers can make anywhere from 85 to 130,000 as well. Then we have the...

Jon Stoddard (35:39.556)
That's amazing. Yeah.

John Akhoian (35:58.306)
guys that are doing laboring work, which is anywhere from $20 to $30 an hour. So those are sort of the ranges.

Jon Stoddard (36:06.944)
Yeah, and on your website, I saw something that got the 99 millionaires. What is that?

John Akhoian (36:13.91)
We have a goal of helping our people through life for them to budget, to plan, and to save, and to create people that are going to become millionaires out there. We've done quite a bit to help a lot of people become millionaires, and our goal is to create a hundred of them. Part of it is through our equity package as well.

Jon Stoddard (36:37.68)
So what you were saying is the equity that you distribute or they earn through that, the value right now is worth a million dollars to these people if there was an exit event.

John Akhoian (36:49.395)
There is people that have valued that over a million at this point, for sure.

Jon Stoddard (36:53.096)
Yeah. Now, let me ask you about that. If they've been with you for 10 years and say, hey, John, I'm going to retire, they get to sell it back to you at fair market value?

John Akhoian (37:05.016)
When they've actually fully vested, yes they can.

Jon Stoddard (37:07.084)
Yes. Oh, fantastic. John, beautiful, man. I wish you the best of luck with Rood or Hero. Yeah.

John Akhoian (37:14.306)
Thank you very much. Yeah, looking good. Enjoy what I do. I've been doing this since I was 17. So I kind of found it my, you know, lifetime mission to keep going.

Jon Stoddard (37:25.392)
That's fantastic. All right, let me pause it right here.