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All right, welcome everyone.
We're hanging out with Roger Smelcer.
Roger, how are you today?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I am fantastic.
Roger, we had a conversation just a few weeks ago about the many different career paths
within the HVACR industry.
And you serve a very unique portion of the industry.
And it happens to be one that I'm very comfortable, very familiar with, one that I spend a lot
of time in.
Now, when we start talking to our educators and we start talking to our students about
career paths, once they get out of the program, a lot of them anticipate that they're going
to end up in a residential or like commercial HVAC situation, right?
They don't always get introduced to all of the different options.
So if you are unfamiliar with HVACCareerMap.org, it's a collaboration of different community
colleges within California.
It is a really cool resource to help show some of the different paths that we have within
our industry.
So let's say we come out of school and maybe we think, oh, we were just going to end up
as a residential technician and we weren't introduced to all of the options.
Well, when we use tools like this to kind of take a look at those different resources,
we can see that there are a variety of different things that we can do.
We can progress out of those entry level jobs into like installers, we can move into warehousing
jobs, but we can also get into the commercial sector.
So let's just say we have an interest in moving over into the commercial environment.
We want to take our HVAC and move it into say refrigeration and some, let's just say
some kitchen style equipment opportunities.
Well, a lot of people don't realize that we have apprenticeship programs that can lead
us into these directions.
And where you specialize is in the cooking equipment service technician realm.
Yeah.
And that was me.
A lot of mom and pop grocery stores and restaurants and large grocery chain grocery stores.
I did a lot of different food service equipment and it wasn't just refrigeration because as
a refrigeration guy, yeah, you're there working on something, but I've talked about this many
times before.
My first encounter with looking at other kitchen equipment was I had a pizza oven at one of
our shops that went down.
I was there looking at an ice machine and he says, hey, Cliff, you think you could take
a look at this pizza oven?
I'm like, pizza oven?
He said, yeah, that's a heating appliance, isn't it?
And I went, well, yeah, it is a heating appliance.
So we have a lot of options in our industry.
So I wanted to spend some time with you talking about the program that you guys have built
and the way that we groom our youth, because the way that we recruit today may not look
similar to the way we recruited five years ago, 10 years ago.
And I think you're the master of recruitment and retention.
I don't know if I'm the master, but we started about seven years ago really trying to attract
young people into our business.
And we looked at where were millennials and Gen Z looking for work and would they be interested
in this type of work?
Yeah.
And I think we kind of struck gold a little bit with some prior auto mechanics and things
that had the willingness to get a little dirty and good mechanical aptitude.
And we thought we could train these people.
Sometimes they got into it and it was working outside in a hot environment.
I lived in California and now live in Arizona.
And I can't imagine working in the Bay on a 110 degree day.
Absolutely.
And sometimes in grocery stores and even sometimes in the cold rooms.
And so I thought, this might be appealing to this group of people.
Of course, we've been able to attract them from all over, but I think the big key to
attracting them for us has just been having the kind of culture where they refer each
other.
So they're trying to help their friends.
We just had just in these last couple of weeks, one young guy in his mid-twenties just recommend
another guy in his mid-twenties to come in and help us.
And that's what we're trying to foster.
That's what we'd like to see.
I've mentioned many times in our industry to different groups that the average age of
our technician is around 27.
Yes.
And that's very young in our industry.
And it's just a testament to really having kind of a defined career path, as you mentioned
before.
Sometimes people come in from residential appliance and they have into our business
as well.
And that's a great transition.
They can apprentice with our guys.
They typically will pick up commercial food equipment very easy if they're coming from
that environment.
And it's been really strong way to bring them in.
Well, let's talk about that apprenticeship because this is very much about what does
successful recruitment look like, whether I'm a school and I'm recruiting technicians
to come into the trade and I'm trying to inform them about all of the different amazing options
once they leave the classroom or I'm a contractor that is trying to build up my clientele.
That's the biggest issue we see right now in the contractor side is retention and recruitment.
But you've been very successful at that.
And if we look at the generation, so I just did a class not too long ago on the basically
six different generations of learners that we work with in society.
When we look at particularly our Gen Z and our millennials, they have some slightly different,
I wouldn't say concerns, but desires for success in their career, especially with Gen Z.
So let's talk about the culture that you're embedding and promoting that culture because
I think that is the driving force that is making this such a successful recruitment strategy.
Yeah.
Well, we like to call it our resume building culture of achievement.
Okay.
Yeah.
But really it's just a resume building culture.
We're looking to build value in each person, not only to our company, but to the world
at large.
Okay.
And the way we do that is usually it starts with the conversation when we're first meeting
the person and bringing them into the organization and defining what their career path would
look like in our organization and what we would be adding to their resume at each stage
through.
So for example, they might come in and we might start them on simple planned maintenance.
And as they're picking that up, they're adding this planned maintenance capability to their
resume.
So they move to installations and more advanced installations and then onto commissioning
and other things like that as they progress through their career.
And that kind of career arc can take anywhere from weeks to months, depending on their ability
and their aptitude.
We're really looking for the same things most companies are looking for.
Sure.
We want to ensure the capability to do the job and if you don't know how to do something,
that you're a quick learner and then just being a team player, working well with others,
having that good chemistry.
Sure.
Absolutely.
So I know personally when I see resumes of my generation, so I'm a Gen Xer, I see resumes
of fellow coworkers and I have read resumes and looked at the person and went, I know
you're more capable than this.
I think as a generation, we weren't groomed very well for building ourselves, especially
like within our resume and how we reflect to others.
But one of the characteristics, particularly of Gen Z is the reflection of their development.
And that's what I see in your program.
And I think many of us, if we're building our recruitment and our retention based on
old strategies, they may not apply to our current generations.
So do you feel that as a driving force from these young folk coming in that they want
to be recognized for their accomplishments?
It is.
It's a driving force.
I think there's some confusion.
You know, a lot of people would say Gen Z or millennials need so much more feedback
than maybe Gen X or baby boomers.
Right.
It's not necessarily that they need more.
They are looking for progress, right?
They're wanting to know how is this helping me long-term?
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, my generation, we just put our heads down and ground it out.
Not really thinking about what is this.
You know, I like this generation.
You know, the thing I love about them the most is they're very experience oriented,
right?
They value experience more than things.
That's why they're all living the van life and moving around.
And we've kind of embraced that if you want to have a great experience, that's what we're
trying to create with this resume building culture.
Okay.
So that you can see when a resume building opportunity comes up, like we just, a good
example is we just moved to a new field service management software.
Okay.
Well, this software is used in 65% of the industry.
It's going to be a really nice line item on every resume in our business.
To show that they have adapted through software.
Right.
And that's not typically anything I would have had on my resume unless it was super
significant.
Like I went back to school to learn something.
Maybe that's what I put on my resume.
Well, we've used mixed reality technology.
We use an AI product.
All that can be added to their resume.
And then we have quarterly goals that our service managers are working with the team,
their teams on, and each goal in order for it to qualify has to read like a line item
on a resume.
Really?
So a good example of that would be, you know, I'm going to increase my mean time to fix
or the time it takes me to fix a fry or not eating by 7%.
That might be the goal this quarter.
Well, that would be great on a resume.
Yeah.
Because I would be impressed.
That you know what your mean time to fix is and that you're working to improve it.
Exactly.
So explaining to them why it would be important on the resume is important as well.
You know, showing them what it means to me as a person that's hiring young people.
Yeah.
And giving them the confidence that they actually are building their resume.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So when you're talking about that, has it been an adaptation of your company and of
your software to track these things and actually give some data to be analyzed?
How does that function?
Yeah, a little bit.
So we do it kind of a one-on-one more personal way than that.
So of course we rely on data for a lot of things in our business.
But with people, we rely a lot more on the one-on-one conversation.
So when we do those quarterly goals, we're meeting with them in person on those.
And we're talking them through.
And a lot of times we're saying, well, that doesn't really read like a line item on your
resume.
Okay.
What if we use the same goal, but we set it like this?
And giving them those prompts to understand, you know, what it's really going to look like
on a resume.
Yeah.
I think that's good.
And our data is showing that we're able to keep these people and get them to refer others.
That's the most important piece to us is how many referrals are we getting?
And is that trend moving upward or is it flat?
Exactly.
I mean, you take my generation, you build a resume preparing for the next stage in your
life.
So you have an amazing retention rate.
So what do you think is that motivator?
So you're building them up personally, you're building their resume, but they're not taking
the resume and moving on to the next contractor.
Well, it seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?
It kind of does.
That's why I wanted us to have this conversation.
And when I have this conversation with other business owners, they're like, why would I
want to build their resume?
They'll go work somewhere else.
Exactly.
It's a big fear for a contractor.
Well, the communication I'm having with our employees is if your employer is not building
your resume, you shouldn't be there.
Right?
So we are continuously building it and we're showing you that we are.
Are you confident that's going to happen wherever you go?
And in every case, the answer is no, I'm not confident.
And so I think we get a lot more retention that way.
And then we've had people when they leave, we don't really have a lot of the issues I
think many companies have with people going to work for other companies or competitors.
We're pretty friendly competitors in the market.
We see it more as a race than a war.
And sometimes we haven't had a position and technicians wanted to move up in that area
and we just didn't have it available and they wanted to go do something else.
Well, you know, we're supportive.
You know, if you can't do it here, we're going to help you get to the next level there.
Many of those people have come back over time.
Not because it wasn't okay at the other company, but because they knew now that they got a
little experience in that we'd take their resume a little bit further.
We're building their personal and professional resume and portfolio at the same time.
So there's buy in.
So a lot of people, if you're not aware, I'm very much about branding and keeping a consistent
feel within a brand.
And part of that is Gen Z in particular are very much brand oriented.
So if you're building a brand and you're building an individual as part of that brand, you build,
you weave a connection between the individual and the brand.
And that's why this philosophy is so much different than ones that we have seen in the
past.
Even for myself, I know that there were opportunities in my career development that were hindered
because people didn't want me to leave.
And so I was at times plateaued and would have to find ways for continued personal development.
So you're promoting the individual to self-reflect on themselves actually.
Yeah.
I mean, a little bit.
People don't think about the resume right until they need it.
Yeah, exactly.
So if you're talking about it a lot and you're making them aware that this is the goal, this
is what we're trying to do.
Because we know if we build their resumes, they'll be more powerful for us, right?
And that's really occurred.
So we have a lot of talented technicians and you're right.
They want to build their brand.
Many of our technicians post what they do on social media.
Of course, they're very conscious about where they are and in what customer and not pushing
brands out there and things that our customers might object to.
But the things that they can show are usually helps for other technicians because they've
caught the bug.
They're helping other technicians build their resumes as well.
We're talking about a generation that thrives on success and building up others.
That is a beauty of this generation.
Very different than my own generation where you built yourself up and you got past others.
That was a very common feel in my generation.
Well, now we have a generation that's very different.
Yeah.
Well, if you look at how the generations compare, you know, I look at millennials and Gen Z
as already networked.
Right.
They're already networked.
They're already connected together.
Many times technician in my age group, I'm 57 and I'm a Gen Xer, but many people in my
age group, when they tend to find a new or more efficient way to fix something, you know,
they'll kind of stick that in their pocket and hold it here as part of their value.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's not true with millennials and Gen Z.
As soon as they learn something, they're posting on Snapchat and Facebook and well, probably
not Facebook, but Instagram or whatever they're using.
They're not standard us old fogies.
And they're networked together, which means they're learning faster.
From each other.
We use this little free app called Marco Polo, you know, and our more senior technicians
post tips and tricks and things for other technicians on there.
And they look at that and it's kind of internal.
It's not really shared out with the world.
Okay.
But we've kind of in the past two years, we've really been transitioning from that internal
to kind of getting it out there externally.
The service industry as a whole is just a really great industry to be in, you know,
and at all levels.
I don't care whether you're working on cars or industrial food processing equipment.
I've had some time in that as well.
It's just amazing to see all the opportunity out there.
You know, it's surprising to me because I've been doing it since I was 19, right?
That people can't see all the opportunity to me.
It's just all low hanging fruit.
It's hard to fathom, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I hope today I'm encouraging somebody to look a little bit deeper into the service
industry and find a spot for yourself and come grow, you know, in one of these service
industries and even ours is a great one.
Yeah.
It's been a wonderful voyage for me.
I do believe that I was able to hone my communication skills being in service.
I truly do.
You know, that's where you learn how to speak to people professionally and you take the
good and you take the bad because not every job is perfect.
So we learn a lot in the service industry.
I really am digging the entire, let's relook at our business plan and build a culture first,
build the culture they will come.
Yep.
I think, you know, we're working on a new program to really try to improve our profitability.
You know, all companies are trying to do that, but we're trying to get as many people involved
helping us because this is another resume building opportunity.
Sure.
Participating in this initiative to just build a more profitable company.
I would love to see a resume of someone that's been at your company for a year or two.
It would probably change a person's perspective on writing their own resume.
Yeah, I hope so.
I hope they're taking the learning that they're taking in here and really thinking about what
that means to their future.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, Roger, wow, that's a lot of wonderful information on building a culture, recruiting
and retaining really based on personal and professional development within the culture
of a company.
And I see this as being a growing trend.
We've already seen the success of it.
I doubt that there's any contractors out here that say they have a surplus of quality technicians
and you've achieved that.
So grateful to have you here, grateful for the education and man, look forward to some
further conversations down the road.
All right.
Fantastic.
I'm happy to be in with you.