Crafting an Enduring Team with Dustin Winter – Ep.285

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:01:17) – How Dustin bought Metro Garage Door
(00:04:28) – Service vs sales revenue and seasonality
(00:07:59) – Growing from 18 to 30 employees
(00:09:04) – Shifting to 52% commercial work
(00:10:01) – Working capital as a competitive moat
(00:13:01) – Converting projects into service contracts
(00:16:26) – Cross-training all technicians
(00:23:34) – Eliminating commission-based pay
(00:30:56) – Building a preventative maintenance program
(00:38:00) – Benefits of scale and deeper teams
(00:41:06) – Fast iteration with daily customer feedback
(00:45:12) – Accelerating cash conversion cycles
(00:53:36) – Tuck-in acquisition strategy
(00:59:50) – Software implementation challenges

Dustin Winter: A lot of companies, they, they just, they take a great pride. They rip your sticker off, they put their sticker on, or put it right over top of it, and they take it kind of like a trophy, some of them actually. They have wall trophy walls. I’ve been in some of the other door companies where they actually have trophy walls of other companies’ stickers-

Alex Bridgeman: Oh

Dustin Winter: that they put on, they put on the wall. And it’s a source of pride. I, I understand it. I’m not saying there’s necessarily wrong- anything wrong with that, but, but that just shows you, like, look, if you’re looking at the lifetime value of a customer, you take like a residential customer and you have to say no, that’s a problem.

Dustin Winter: So having a larger team and be able to get to everything and have that, it definitely makes it easier. A lot of things when you’re growing get more complicated, but that’s one of the things that gets, does get easier. The, having a more robust, larger team, a deeper team, uh, you miss less of those opportunities, and that feels great

Alex Bridgeman: Dustin, thanks for coming on Think Like an Owner.

Alex Bridgeman: This podcast I’ve hosted for the last eight years is all about building small businesses, and it’s been fun to get to know you here in Minneapolis and hear all about Metro and what you’re working on. Can you tell us, like, how’d you get into this? Like, how’d you get into garage doors, this business? Uh, we were just talking about you used to live in Missouri, now you guys moved up here.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Walk me through, like, how you got here.

Dustin Winter: W- well, I– it seems like maybe I kind of fell into garage doors, but it was, it w- it was, it was, it was somewhat purposeful. I was in commercial finance for roughly fifteen years, and especially on the back end of that banking career, I, I really wanted to find a business that, you know, I could buy and, and kinda be creative with and apply some of the knowledge that I’d learned in finance and working with small businesses that I could apply and kind of build my own thing.

Dustin Winter: And, you know, I really got serious about it. I really tried to back into a profile of something I wanted. So I wasn’t necessarily looking for garage doors, but there was a profile that I’d kind of developed over the years of something I wanted, something that was relatively low risk, wasn’t cyclical, had good pricing control, a good sales diversification.

Dustin Winter: A lot of things that a banker might look for underwriting for a healthy company or a, a company that is strong in different cycles, different, uh, markets. And anyways, so I built out a punch list of what I was looking for, and I was looking at a lot of off-market opportunities for a while and bird-dogging opportunities for other buyers.

Dustin Winter: And I finally saw something to really kind of check most of the boxes and decided to make an offer on it. So I made an offer on Metro Garage Door, and fairly quickly we had it under LOI, and I came into this with my brother, Dietrich. He’s more of a passive owner. He has two businesses of his own up on the Iron Range, but, uh, he’s been an operator much longer than me, and it, it really felt like a good partner for me to, especially, uh- Kind of being my first full-throated venture in entrepreneurship.

Dustin Winter: I did start some small businesses first, you know, a, a ways before that, but it was smaller things, things I could experiment with and… But so it’s been a good partnership. But yeah, we, we just decided to dive in, and it really did check all those boxes. Garage doors, it’s, it’s service-based, it’s, it’s, uh, when things are broken, they need to get fixed.

Dustin Winter: Doors aren’t really gonna probably go away anytime soon. Yeah, I don’t think so. Door technology is not something that could be outsourced or, you know, generally speaking, sold on Amazon, even though they’ve tried to get into this space. It really comes down to, I mean, local service companies are just, you know, they’re relatively stable and we– I think a lot of folks saw that, especially during the pandemic here not too many y- years ago, where home services really performed well during that period, where a lot of other businesses really suffered.

Dustin Winter: And so this industry was fortunate that, you know, whether someone’s gonna extend the life of their door, it kinda goes to the service side, or if someone’s gonna buy a new door, you know, it, it’s a service that we can go either way. And so during maybe lean times, it’s– we, you know, we’ve noticed that it leans towards more service revenue, where folks are extending the life of the door.

Dustin Winter: And then maybe where things are maybe not as lean economically, at a macro level at least, there’s more door sales and replacements, so yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Have you seen that even over the course of your ownership last couple years too?

Dustin Winter: Yeah, I have. Yeah. It’s, it’s interesting. It’s really fascinating. So they just kinda invert a little bit And there’s obviously, there’s definitely a seasonality to it as well.

Dustin Winter: There’s a lot more door sales during like late spring going into late fall as far as residential doors, and then in the wintertime that kinda drops off and, but then the ser- it inverts where service revenue, service revenue and work goes up during the wintertime and it’s really kind of our Super Bowl as far as service work is in the wintertime and the volume goes up tre- tremendously.

Dustin Winter: And part of that is because things break when it’s cold you know?

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah.

Dustin Winter: But also I think there’s a lot more, I think, real estate type-minded things. Folks are working on their garage more during the summer. You know, it’s cold Minnesota winters when it’s, you know, negative 10, you know, unless you have a heated garage.

Dustin Winter: Uh, the– but even if you have a heated garage, the, maybe the doors aren’t going up and down as much ’cause you’re trying to keep everything in. So maybe the doors aren’t cycling as much in the wintertime, I guess is what I’ve heard from some, some folks

Alex Bridgeman: but- But if it does break now everything in your garage is negative 10 degrees.

Dustin Winter: Yeah, yeah. So the stakes are higher. Yeah. And then on the commercial side it’s a little more, it’s not quite as cyclical. It’s a little more steady and, you know, we’re, you know, we’re about f- I think 2025 we finished up at 52% commercial as far as our mix versus residential and that keeps growing and, and that side’s really about continuity business so for our customers, you know.

Dustin Winter: So if, yeah, I mean they’re using that door for their business so if it’s broken it’s gotta get fixed or it’s a, or it’s a bottleneck in their operation and workflow. So, you know, we’re– it’s far more proactive historically where we’re doing a lot more preventative maintenance on the commercial side so it’s, it’s, it’s more ongoing That happens somewhat on the residential side too, but it does– it seems like longer time horizons.

Dustin Winter: Sometimes you’ll only see a customer every three to five years. But we’ve also done a lot more preventative maintenance, like, programs with residential. Either just getting, you know, making sure we let the customers know it’s, you know, if we’re coming out there every year and doing a lubrication adjust, you can avoid a lot of the big problems down the road.

Dustin Winter: Uh, you know, instead of, you know, spend $160 a year instead of all of a sudden having a two-$2,000 bill for something that probably wouldn’t have broke if the door was balanced, lubricated, and adjusted every year. So, you know, that’s kind of the thought.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Michelle and I are closing on a house in Oregon next week.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: And the walkthrough with the builder, they’re look- going through all the different parts of the house, and we get to the garage door and they’re, they’re saying, “Yeah, we recommend, you know, lubricating, you know, once a year to maintain health of the door.” And I was, back of my mind, like, “Yeah. All right.

Alex Bridgeman: That sounds good.”

Dustin Winter: Yeah. “

Alex Bridgeman: Good.”

Dustin Winter: Um-

Alex Bridgeman: Thank you for that pitch …

Dustin Winter: most manufacturers actually, if you look in the fine print on, on the actual product from the manufacturers, it actually voids the warranty on a lot of doors if you don’t– it still sa- you know, it needs to be lubricated and adjusted annually, or it voids the warranty.

Dustin Winter: Look, I mean, you know, it is what it is. I mean, some folks, depends on how much you use. And I think a door, the cycles and, and, and that and whatnot. And also we’ve got some– we’ve put out videos even where folk- you show people how to do it themselves. Like, we don’t have to be the ones, but we recommend it.

Dustin Winter: We wanna make sure we’re educating folks like, “Hey, a little bit, just a little bit of lube and a little love and care can avoid a lot of problems.” You know?

Alex Bridgeman: And when, when did you buy the business, and what did it look like in terms of, um, team size, mix when you bought it?

Dustin Winter: Yeah. Purchased Metro Garage Door in August of 2020.

Dustin Winter: At the time, you know, we had– there was 18 employees, I believe. Today, almost six years later, we’re right around 30 employees. So we keep growing. And yeah, we’ve, we’ve– as far as the revenue and, and, and amount of work we do, we’ve more than doubled what we do. And it’s been, uh… We’ve been– we keep on growing, so.

Alex Bridgeman: Was it the similar 50/50 commercial, residential?

Dustin Winter: It wasn’t, no. Initially, it was only about 12% commercial. It was a really healthy 12%, and we had really strong relationships and, and technicians that were really just… They were master technicians, really strong. I think there was– You know, I think owners have to make a decision in, like, in this type of industry, you know, kinda what they wanna do.

Dustin Winter: I, I, I really kinda feel like moving more commercial. I don’t– We don’t wanna diminish what we do on residential. That’s growing as well. But commercial, we’re growing at a more rapid pace, and we really like that. Whereas some owners don’t like the, the working capital needs that are required to grow a commercial side of their business where, you know, you, you…

Dustin Winter: a lot of folks are on terms or if you’re doing new projects, ground-up projects, you know, that, uh, cash conversion cycle can get kinda long. And so you, you gotta be comfortable with the idea you’re gonna, you’re gonna need a lot more working capital and, you know, you’re gonna have to float a lot more product and labor.

Dustin Winter: And, but if you lean into that, I th- we feel like that’s, uh, one, a great

Dustin Winter: moat for us, our expertise in that area, but also it’s just, it’s a very stable piece of the business. It’s, it’s just seemed to be very stable year to year. It’s one of the most stable pieces that we’ve noticed revenue-wise and relationship-wise.

Alex Bridgeman: Do you think the higher working capital requirements, does that mean practically speaking, that there’s just fewer competitors and fewer folks bidding on service work in these projects?

Alex Bridgeman: Or is, is that not really a side effect of the working capital requirement, you think?

Dustin Winter: There are. Yeah, I think so. I think there’s, there’s very specific, like niche commercial areas that, uh, certain garage door companies focus on. Uh, so that’s very se- as it gets kinda segmented, but also just in general, the expertise and commitment for, for commercial, yeah, it does seem to like narrow it down to just a, like a very small group of door companies that are doing that type of commercial work.

Dustin Winter: So yeah, there’s less people involved. The working capital maybe more I was referencing is, is just Or maybe that does kinda weed out also. Yeah, I mean, look, I think we, we recently acquired, you know, automated door service and, and merged them into our operation in April. And, and, uh, the prior owner, because of their smaller size, even though they had really great relationships service-wise, they were almost 100% just commercial service.

Dustin Winter: On the door work, I think it’s very difficult for some owners when you’re, when, you know, when you’re a smaller outfit to put out, you know, maybe 50, $100,000 for product for a project that you’re not gonna get paid for, you know, maybe functionally for 60, 90 days sometimes just due to logistics. You gotta buy the materials, lock down the price, and then you can’t necessarily…

Dustin Winter: You know, the project doesn’t necessarily start right on time e- every time. And then, and then once it’s done, then you bill it out, and then you got, you know, 45 to 60 days for, you know, the GC to work with the owner, get the… You know, get everything, the, you know, your pay app approved, your progress billing approved.

Dustin Winter: And before you know it, you’re… You know, you floated it for three months, and you start doing a half a dozen jobs like that. You know, you know, you have to have that, that’s, that cash and that working capital, and you gotta get comfortable with it getting tied up, you know? So– A- and if you don’t have good processes to manage the cash conversion cycle, it can really get away from people, I mean, to where maybe it’s six months before you get paid if, uh– And I, you know, I don’t wanna get into the weeds, but if you don’t have good controls and processes on making sure you get paid when you need to get paid, it can really spin out on people.

Dustin Winter: Or, or if you just don’t even know what your company’s rights are, I mean, you can really feel squeezed sometimes. Like, how far should I ask? You know, we should’ve been paid by now, but… And making sure you d- you know, you, you’re building relationships, but also setting boundaries and, and, and expectations.

Dustin Winter: And, uh, in the construction world of commercial construction, uh, definitely is that’s always kind of a push and pull and depends who you’re working with, you know?

Alex Bridgeman: Is there usually an opportunity at the end of the commercial job to get a service contract in place?

Dustin Winter: Yeah, I mean, that’s– Look, I mean, think everything’s to some degree is a play for service.

Dustin Winter: It’s

Alex Bridgeman: kind of top

Dustin Winter: of funnel. Whether it’s residential or commercial, you know, it’s about a long-term relationship, one, but also the margins are gonna be higher on r- on service, and that’s just the way it is. And so that’s kind of the, the key to that lifetime value of the customer. So like if we’re gonna– if there’s a ground-up project for new doors, new building, and we put the doors, new doors in, if we can capture the service on the back end, then the, then that project, the way we look at as far as what our actual margins are or how, how aggressive we wanna be, it really depends on whether we can get that service after, after the install.

Dustin Winter: ‘Cause if we get that service, the lifetime value for the average lifetime of a bus- a customer in this industry, it changes systematically, you know. So yes, you know, so we have, we have procedures. So like most of the time you’re not dealing with the owner, you’re owning with– or you’re working with a GC, a general contractor, like say like Kraus Anderson or, or somebody, uh, like that.

Dustin Winter: And it’s– And the key is once do great work, get it finished, and then at the final closeout and walkthrough is sometimes the first time we’re actually meeting the actual end user or customer for the first time really. So… And we’re walking around with the GC and the customer, and then we make sure our master technician, the person who led the team to put the doors in, are, are there walking through, you know, the system, how it works, making sure they understand, you know, you know, what they have, and then also just what’s needed to make sure those things don’t break, you know, ’cause they’re huge investments for some folks.

Dustin Winter: And So that’s the time when we’re usually presented like, “Look, you know, let’s get together a p- uh, preventive maintenance schedule, you know, that’s suited for the number of cycles you’re gonna be running here. How, you know, these type of doors, and then get that locked down right at closeout.” So, you know, still go through like the, like the warrant- one-year warranty period, but then even beyond that, just making sure we have the r- you know, the re- a good relationship and understanding what’s needed to make sure, you know, everything stays healthy.

Dustin Winter: And I think sometimes folks wanna use their own folks, uh, you know, like maybe someone, maybe they have another facility and they’re already using someone for maintenance. But, you know… And so, so we understand that, but then also, so, but also we do encourage folks to use us, obviously. Well, one, we want the business.

Dustin Winter: But, but beyond that, you know, when the person that built the system and put it in is really, I do feel like the best person to service that. And, you know, sometimes things can get lost in translation and a l- and your standard just kinda lube team, you know, with some companies might be cheaper, but if they don’t understand some of these more complex systems, they might not be preventing, uh, doing PMs maybe the way it’s necessary to make sure that door’s really healthy, I guess.

Alex Bridgeman: Well, how does the profile of technician differ on your team between residential technicians and commercial in terms of the personality? Like what are they like doing in residential and then the techs on commercial? Like what, what drives them to like doing commercial work?

Dustin Winter: I think most of our team, when y- the technicians we’re looking for are, are usually hungry people who really wanna learn the trade.

Dustin Winter: They’re, they love mechanical things. They’re, they love working with their hands. And we run things a li- little different than most shops in the industry. I mean, I know some other folks do it this way too, but m- most, most garage door companies and even Metro when I first got here, was segmented where we had residential installers, then we had residential service, commercial installers, and commercial service.

Dustin Winter: And it was very segmented and there was different pay grades and different… You know, they were– It was very like these are almost wholly owned diff- separate business units. Um- Like four

Alex Bridgeman: totally

Dustin Winter: different teams. Yeah. And so we changed that up, part of it’s through necessity during the pandemic. We, you know, the labor market was tough and tight, and we became more cross-functional just ’cause we had to and just kind of a happy accident.

Dustin Winter: We kind of found some secret sauce that works for us, where we just decided to have a fully cross-functional team where there are no residential techs or commercial techs. Everybody’s on a path to becoming a master technician. And to become a master technician, you need to be– you need to pass four out of five certifications through the International Door Association or their education arm, the IDEA.

Dustin Winter: And to do that, you have three out of the four are commercial. So that means you have to have residential. To become a master technician, you have to be proficient in both sides, commercial and residential. So we just really like that one. It, it– we found that we could run with a smaller team and, and get more done or if like one bucket of the funnel was lower due to se- like seasonal, whatever it might be, the fall, so we don’t have enough residential door installs, then we don’t have to say, “Hey, we don’t have work for you.”

Dustin Winter: We kinda went to more of a universal technician that could work across different, you know, different areas. And so we, we start everybody off, you know, like say a tune technician’s getting trained in and they st- start on residential install and then they work into residential service, then start, you know, if we see a lot of aptitude and they’re doing great, then we start moving into commercial, a little more higher stakes situations.

Dustin Winter: And it’s– they’re always paired with, say, like a master technician. So it’s a very like almost like apprenticeship type training program, but everyone’s on some path to become a master technician, so they’re working on both sides. And we really like that here ’cause there, there is like a, there’s almost like a different breed of technician historically, where, uh, you have a lot of commercial technicians that are…

Dustin Winter: They’re kinda grizzled. They’re kinda, you know, hard-nosed, you know. They’re ki- they’re fun though. I mean, they’re just like You know, there, there’s just, there’s a different, like, personality I saw kinda in that that came with that culture. You know, on the residential side it was more people facing. It was very more customer service kinda facing.

Dustin Winter: Just, I just seen more of it, not that the other doesn’t have that. But it’s just… It… And, and what we found also just through happenstance was when our commercial folks started working also on the residential side, it kinda softened them a little bit. I liked it. I could be wrong. That was my perspective, and I just really liked that it kinda softened their approach.

Dustin Winter: And vice versa, it seemed like it really battle-hardened kind of some of our more residential folks as they got more commercial experience. They just kinda seemed to think at things at a higher level a- and as far as mechanics of the door and, and, uh, a confidence in kinda what they were doing. So it… And, and, and also kinda gave folks that maybe traditionally would’ve just been residential, who had no path other than for career development other than just being a residential tech, having that career development be, be able to be moving towards a master technician and doing some commercial work.

Dustin Winter: It just kinda felt like it gave a little more purpose behind the role and more of a trajectory instead of kind of maybe, like, “Well, maybe I’ll be a commercial tech at some point.” And then- Yeah,

Alex Bridgeman: it’s a path and a new challenge.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. It just, we just liked it. It, we kinda fell into it by accident, but then we just liked it so much we’ve, we’ve leaned into it over the years and, and that’s just how we, we approach everything.

Dustin Winter: You do have to… Commercial technicians tend to historically have always been paid more. And I think that’s why it was segmented, is I think owners wanted to, you know, not pay top dollar for maybe something was lower margin, lower ticket maybe on the residential side. But what we find is that’s kinda, you know, if, if you run things a specific way, I feel like you s- you, you don’t…

Dustin Winter: You gain enough efficiencies that, and, and other added benefits. I think it just works better this way, you know?

Alex Bridgeman: From a, a pay perspective, if every technician is trained on both residential and commercial, how do you determine a, a pay scale? Like if- Oh,

Dustin Winter: yeah, I guess I kind of

Alex Bridgeman: didn’t really- Like if a new hire is sitting here and you’re laying out the career path

Dustin Winter: at

Alex Bridgeman: Metro- Well,

Dustin Winter: we, we,

Alex Bridgeman: we-

Alex Bridgeman: what’s that look like?

Dustin Winter: Well, so look, because we did kinda go to a cross-functional team, we do pay technicians kinda above market, I guess maybe historically than some other pla- other garage door companies. So again, I think it’s just on that path, you know, as they get more functional, get more, more cross-trained, their pay goes up.

Dustin Winter: But just in general, though, we pay kinda more above market than maybe where I think some installers and some, some companies are j- it’s really kind of a more transient. It feels like a more transient kind of- you know, not as lucrative kind of, uh, opportunity for some folks. I mean, they’re learning doors and I get it, and I guess different people have their different paths for advancement.

Dustin Winter: But, but yeah, I think just on a scale, I think on average our, probably our pay grade is, uh, well above, even on entry level above most folks because we expect a lot and you’re gonna be doing, you know, we’re expecting you to learn a lot of things over the course of a, a number of years. So, and it takes, you know, it can takes, it can take several years to really get a seasoned great commercial technician.

Dustin Winter: But I, I feel like to some degree it kinda compressed like the, the range between top pay and bottom pay among our tech team But the tech team that we have though is so much more proficient and well-rounded and skilled where we can almost, you know, during a given day if we need a commercial y- we can pretty much send almost anybody to any call, whether it’s commercial, residential.

Dustin Winter: You know, certain folks who are still obviously in training and don’t have experience and things, we pair them up, and we just eat that cost. We don’t pass it on to the customer. So we build that, some of that pair- that pairing and mentorship in just to… That’s cost of doing business. That’s basically part of our training program.

Dustin Winter: So we don’t pass that along, but we’ll put two commercial people on maybe something only maybe would traditionally require one, but we’ll send them out there. We wanna build capacity in all our folks as much as possible. I, and we’ll win at the end if we do that, we feel like.

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely, yeah. And h- how do you balance– Do you have a commission plus hourly pay combination of some kind?

Dustin Winter: When I got here, we had what’s something called a unit-based system or piece rate system where it was heavily… And it was just on the residential side, but the residential side was, you know, kinda, yeah, it was very heavily commission-based. And but very early on, we went away from that within about a year of me purchasing Metro and, and there was, you know, the reason was that is the, the kind of the customer experience of what, uh, maybe it’s ’cause I had fresh eyes coming in from outside the industry, but we just noticed that something was just kind of amiss in the whole– in a lot of service-based industries where the customers were kinda on guard.

Dustin Winter: I think they were kinda getting– they were used to getting taken advantage of or high-pressure sales. And when the technicians are incentivized to sell, whether they’re presenting something that’s legitimate or not, the customer picks up on that, and we s- kinda sense that, like, fight or flight response.

Dustin Winter: And we’re kinda… I was really watching, and I was really trying to figure out what that dynamic was and, and we really felt like it was the sales piece of it. And we w- so we decided, how do we get… Well, we, we questioned, like, how do we get– We want our customers to see us as professionals and more of like a someone who is objective and is gonna give them the best advice possible.

Dustin Winter: And it just seemed like for us it was One of the only ways we could really do that is get a, get rid of the incentive-based structure. So we basically took the existing team and said, “Hey, here’s what you made last year on commission. We’re just gonna pay you that this year, build it into your base pay.

Dustin Winter: We’re gonna up your pay. We’re just gonna assume you’re gonna do that same great work. And then we’re even gonna give you a little raise on top of that, just so there’s no way, you know, so there’s no concern about, you know, losing money on this. And we’re just gonna, like, approach this differently to where we’re gonna ap- approach the customer, and we’re, we’re gonna present what’s an, an immediate need, what’s a need that maybe you’re gonna have in a couple years and maybe we could take care of now, and then maybe needs that are long-term, probably don’t need to be done, but if you really wanna bulletproof your garage, we can do it, but it’s probably not necessary.”

Dustin Winter: So it’s more about immediacy. We, we didn’t really like the good, better, and best, ’cause I– like, what does that mean? I, I don’t know. Better than what? Best? I, I don’t know. It’s– I think it’s really about the functionality of the, the door, you know, safety, or if you just really want a nice and pristine door. So it’s really about, I think, immediacy of, of a need more than it is, is it better?

Dustin Winter: I don’t know. Maybe, maybe I’m splitting hairs a little bit, but we– so we really went to that kinda model. And so I think

Alex Bridgeman: Have you seen any changes from average ticket-

Dustin Winter: Yeah … before or

Alex Bridgeman: after?

Dustin Winter: Oh, we saw it right away. So, uh, ’cause I w- uh, initially it kind of scared us ’cause it was an experiment, and when we…

Dustin Winter: Initially ticket sizes went down, I think, uh, for the first couple months, and we’re like, “Oh, maybe we made a mistake here.” And then they started creeping up, and then it surpassed our average ticket size, and they just kept on going up. And it w- and so it was like, “Okay, I think we might be onto something here.”

Dustin Winter: The other thing is our customer, like, service-type, like, five-star reviews and the customer ser- service experiences that people were going out of their way to sh- show praise was just started skyrocketing. I mean, we had, like, maybe 270 reviews on Google, and now we’re sitting at around 4,000, you know? And, and we didn’t really see that start happening until we went away from the commission-based model.

Dustin Winter: And you, and even when you read our reviews, it seems like every seven to 10 or every, like, maybe it’s even more than that, so it depends, but you’ll see, like, smattered in, like, in our five-star reviews, a lot of people say, “Hey, I really appreciated, like, the no-pressure sales, you know, but you were thorough and you presented everything, but I didn’t feel any pressure.”

Dustin Winter: And that’s really what we were looking for, is that experience. Like, the no haggle, no pressure. ‘Cause, uh, unfortunately in these service-based industries, home, uh, they, there’s so much pressure, and people are so on edge whether they’re getting ripped off or not, whether it be, you know, whether someone’s telling them to replace something, well, is it because they want the commission or is it ’cause they’re actually really giving me advice?

Dustin Winter: And it’s really hard to tell sometimes. And there’s also just a lot of scam, scam companies out there, you know? Maybe I shouldn’t call them scam. But y- it, it definitely seems like they go in with the mindset, “I’m gonna get, I don’t know.” So I’ve heard, actually heard some door companies will set, like, a minimum ticket size of, like, $1,000.

Dustin Winter: Well, how can you set you know, in my mind, like, how can you set a minimum ticket size? You haven’t even looked at– You don’t even know what’s there yet, you know? And so what I think it does is I think it puts pressure on the, on the, uh, sale, uh, the technician, making them more of a salesman than a technician or a professional.

Dustin Winter: And all of a sudden they’re going in trying to find $1,000 worth of things they can sell. And unfortunately I think what that tends to lead to is folks maybe unintentionally kind of leaning towards pushing things that maybe aren’t needed, and that’s, that’s where the trust, I think, is broken. And, and what we also found was when we went away from the commission base, it took the pressure off the technicians too.

Dustin Winter: They just wanna do a great job and do purposeful work, and they don’t want that pressure. You know, nobody likes selling things. Maybe has that terms traditionally used. You know, it can be kind of, uh… I, I, you know, I think it’s liberating them to know that, hey, there is no minimum ticket size. We just want you to be professional.

Dustin Winter: You know, w- we really are gonna judge you on the customer experience, not on how much you sell. And, and kind of come at it back, uh, kind of backdoor, like w- find a way to get optimizing, you know, what we do and how, you know, how profitable we are, h- you know, how much we do through just a great experience and, and, and, and, and being upfront, honest and-

Alex Bridgeman: I mean, no, ’cause I mean, this is like a similar thing you talked about with preventative maintenance.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Was the less you made it sound like a, a membership of some kind-

Dustin Winter: Yeah …

Alex Bridgeman: the more successful it became as a pitch.

Dustin Winter: It is. I think as soon as someone hears… Like, we don’t even use the word contract ’cause it’s like, look, w- what are we trying to do? We’re just trying to stay in contact with you and make sure we have a relationship with you, and do what’s actually needed.

Dustin Winter: So it’s not like pay this annual membership fee and do, you know, sign this contract or this agree… It’s really about just saying, “Hey, can we call you annually around this time to come out and do your, do a lubricate and adjust your door?” You know, no pressure. If we call you at the time and you, and it’s not a g- and you don’t, and you change your mind, maybe money’s tight or whatever it might be, it’s fine.

Dustin Winter: There’s no commitment. We’re not gonna charge you. But we wanna build that relationship where It’s, again, it’s no pressure, but we just want, like, it’s kind more of kind almost like a handshake agreement to some degree. They don’t- they’re not locked in. They don’t have to pay in advance. They pay when it happens, but we just get them on the schedule and, and set up a routine.

Alex Bridgeman: So after a repair-

Dustin Winter: Yeah …

Alex Bridgeman: and the technician is closing out the, the job with the customer, do they schedule at that moment for a year out?

Dustin Winter: They do.

Alex Bridgeman: For that-

Dustin Winter: Yes.

Alex Bridgeman: Okay. They’ll- So they walk out of… They, they leave the customer’s home with a lube and adjust the next year?

Dustin Winter: They do, yeah. And so what it is, is on the final walkthrough they go over everything, go over everything, bill, of course, what was done, and then when it…

Dustin Winter: And make sure they’re completely sat- 100% satisfied. And if they are, you know, say, “Hey, is it okay?” You know, and they say, “Hey, is it okay we l- you know, to get on our annual PM program where we come out and we lubricate and adjust your door every year?” We give them the pricing, and, you know, and explain to them that, hey, it’s, it’s, it’s a low commitment.

Dustin Winter: If, you know, if it’s not gonna work for you or if you ever wanna just, you know, not do it, it’s fine, but we’re just gonna call you every year. And sometimes we, we do… Or some of our technicians, you know, kinda emphasize the fact that, like, one thing… Again, we really don’t like the pressure sales thing. So we don’t, despite our vast database of customers from since 1978, and, you know, we don’t, we don’t farm our, you know, our data and start and do, uh…

Dustin Winter: We really don’t do outbound callings. Uh, so we tell the customer, “Look, we’re, we’re never gonna text you like, ‘Hey, how’s your door doing?’ Or spam your email or… So like, “Hey, we’re here in front of you. This is when we do it.” So w- that’s what we really focus on, is like at the time of a service and a good experience, “Hey, do you wanna keep this going?

Dustin Winter: Here’s a way we can kinda k- keep on top of things or continue to improve the doors.” ‘Cause maybe, maybe there’s things that they do need in a couple years, but maybe each year we can knock out a little bit something else may- within their budget. You know, maybe change out one operator this year, but maybe the other two doors are in the budget.

Dustin Winter: Maybe next year we come out and we knock out another one. And we can do it over time so where it’s not all at once or I think that’s a… It just feels healthier that way. But yeah, we lock it down at the end of the, end of the call, the technician does. We, we put in our PM schedule, and then, you know, we call them in a year, and then we call them every year after that as, as long as they want to, want us to.

Alex Bridgeman: And what’s been the… Have you measured what the kinda success rate is of adoption of a annual plan?

Dustin Winter: Yeah, it’s kinda tough to say what it is, ’cause it’s been growing so much every month since we started doing it. I mean, just even, like, four months ago, we were probably averaging about 80 sign-ups a month, which was r- exciting, ’cause, you know, I think just a few years ago it was almost nothing until we kinda dialed in how we wanted to approach it.

Dustin Winter: And then, like, in June, we… I think we had 168 people sign up for that in one month. And it’s just a great way to als- you know, just to build that out, ’cause then if we can keep the retention high each year, that should build on itself, and we’ll have a nice base of calls for each year kind of locked in.

Dustin Winter: And it is real- uh, really great for any business to have that recurring, you know, relationship, uh, especially during times of year maybe there’s ebb and flow as far as Seasonality, whatever it might be. If you got kind of a slow day, if you have a nice pool of PM folks that within a month could be called, you can, you can fill in spots, smooth out schedules, make sure we can get…

Dustin Winter: make sure guys can get their hours so you don’t have the choppiness that you have without it.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. So

Dustin Winter: yeah, it’s good to- So it smooths it out. Yeah, it’s great …

Alex Bridgeman: just try to schedule them for that, like, period of time where you know it’s gonna be a little slower and-

Dustin Winter: Yeah. Well, typically we just say, “Hey, j- it’ll be 30 days.

Dustin Winter: It, it’ll probably be within 30 days of today,” like when they set it up. And so what we can do over time is say someone’s like, you know, if, if historically March is maybe a slow month for us, you know, if someone signed up in April, we can migrate that the pro- next year and maybe do 30 days before, and s- slowly mi- migrate calls towards historically slow periods.

Dustin Winter: And each year we can kind of migrate a little more so where over the course of two, three, five years, you can kind of find, you can kind of start settling these schedules into where they’re most needed. And then over t- time, it just helps smooth everything out. And so we have a team that works on that. So each month, you know when to pull things forward, when to maybe push the, you know, do them when the, right on the mark or push, you know, push them out.

Dustin Winter: And so it’s a, just something I, I encourage folks if they’re gonna do that, don’t get too rigid. I mean, it’s, it’s a great tool and you can use it in different ways and just leave enough flexibility in there where you can, like, use it for these other purposes, you know, for your team.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I mean, that seems like a…

Alex Bridgeman: I’m sure from the financials you can see the, the smoothness that that creates over time.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Where maybe before the plan was implemented, it was maybe more fluctuating.

Dustin Winter: It is, especially as you do more commercial. I mean, commercial can be choppy. It’s big tick- bigger ticket, uh, bigger projects. In some ways it’s smoother ’cause it’s more reliable, but it’s like, it’s very, like, it’s, it’s intensive type work.

Dustin Winter: So say we’re, we’re st- like we just did, uh, we’re working on the Victoria Fire Station is a project we’re working on right now, a large project, what, bi-fold doors, I believe eight bi-fold doors. It’s a big project, so it can be really intense for like, three weeks and then poof, all right, now we’re done, or it’s at, at a pause till the next phase.

Dustin Winter: And so- You know, that’ll tie up maybe four or five technicians, you know, but then it’ll free up. And als- you know, so it’s the commercial can be kind of choppy that way, where it’s very intense, or even the service work, it’s, it’s not just maybe changing a bus at spring. It, it’s a little more intensive and, uh, it’s just, it’s choppier in ways.

Dustin Winter: As we grow and get the portfolio bigger, it does just naturally smooth out a little bit, but there’s still enough, there’s still some chop in there. So that, that’s why I really like having the residential piece also involved is all these things kind of play together to help smooth it out. You know, it’s smooth out everything we do.

Dustin Winter: And the smoother we can get our flow as far as work, the easier it is to manage the, obviously the, the labor pool, our guys, what we need, budget, working capital. All these things kind of play into that smoothness. It’s ’cause, yeah, if you have giant peaks in your year, it can be, can be kind of jarring to a business.

Dustin Winter: I’m sure a lot of business owners know what I’m talking about. Yeah. Like if you’re doing a million dollars in June, but March you’re only doing 400, you know, a 100, 400,000, it’s like, and then, and then you go back down to three, you know, something like that, you know, it’s, it… That can be kind of as far as staffing levels and then als- just cash flow and, and it, it just, yeah, the smoother the better.

Dustin Winter: So you wanna fill in all the gaps and make sure you’re optimizing your time and making sure you’re making the best use of your technician team.

Alex Bridgeman: Are there other benefits of building a more scaled and growing business that you see across the rest of the company? Like you have with a larger group of techs that are all cross-trained, as you have more techs, there’s more ability to get to jobs faster and kind of manage where people

Dustin Winter: go.

Dustin Winter: As we grow. Yeah. Uh, yeah, look, there’s a lot of benefits to growing. There’s a lot of pains, but as you get a deeper team, deeper knowledge- You know, more flexibility in a lot of ways. Yeah, growing… You know, when we were 18 employees, yeah, you have much more limited resources to take on maybe a large project and disrupt, you know…

Dustin Winter: I mean, if, when we, you know, if you only had, you know… There was a period, like, where we had maybe nine technicians, and it was, you know, that was many years ago, and it was just like, yeah, well, if you take on a large project like Victoria and you tie up four technicians, well, you just chopped your team in half.

Dustin Winter: Now, if service volume picks up while that project’s going, you’re having to tell customers, “No, I can’t get out there.” And that’s… You just never wanna say no, because then they, guess what? They gotta call the next person, uh, the next co- company maybe, ’cause it’s an immediate need. Now, you’ve kinda functionally lost that customer i- in a way.

Dustin Winter: Maybe they’ll come back ’cause they’ve known you maybe for a long time, but it’s… One of the lifeblood of this industry is stickers on doors. So if somebody else goes out on a door maybe you’ve serviced for, or a customer you’ve serviced for 20 years on their doors, now somebody else had to get out there because you couldn’t get to them, well, guess what?

Dustin Winter: That other company, they’re gonna put their sticker over your sticker. We always ask before we do that. We’re always, you know, we’re very sens- you know, we wanna make sure the customer’s like, “Hey, do you worry, you wanna put sticker? You want us to put it over the o- their own sticker or to remove it?” Or, you know, we, we don’t just do it.

Dustin Winter: But some com- a lot of companies, they just, they take a great pride. They rip your sticker off, they put their sticker on or put it right over top of it, and they take it kind of like a trophy, some of them actually. They have wall trophy walls. I’ve been in some of the other door companies where they actually have trophy walls of other companies’ stickers-

Alex Bridgeman: Oh

Dustin Winter: that they put on, they put on the wall. And it’s a source of pri- I, and I understand it. I’m not saying there’s necessarily wrong, anything wrong with that, but, but that just shows you, like, look, if you’re looking at the lifetime value of a customer, you take, like, a residential customer, and you have to say no, that’s a problem.

Dustin Winter: So having a larger team and be able to get to everything and have that, it definitely makes it easier. A lot of things when you’re growing Get more complicated, but that’s one of the things that gets us get easier. The, having a more robust, larger team, a deeper team, uh, you, you miss less of those opportunities, and that feels great.

Dustin Winter: So-

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah …

Dustin Winter: I like that. We’re, we’re in an enviable position right now. I really like, you know, the size and, uh, we’re gonna keep growing, but yeah, it, it gets easier as it goes along, as the team grows and develops.

Alex Bridgeman: I’m also curious about, and what I, what I find so interesting about Garage door is you have, every day you have a certain number of customers that are calling, whether they’re a repeat or they’re new customers.

Alex Bridgeman: And so every single day acro- es- if you have, you know, 15 or 20 techs each doing three to four jobs, you know, that could be almost 80 jobs in a day. Yeah. And so every single day you have a pretty large sample size of, you know, opportunities with customers to try things.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Like, like, “Hey, does this approach work better?

Alex Bridgeman: Let’s try it just this week. Like, we’ll get feedback on it-

Dustin Winter: Yeah …

Alex Bridgeman: today if it’s working or not.” Like, the feedback cycles for trying something-

Dustin Winter: Oh, it is … is fast. Yeah, your error rate tends to actually come up sometimes, you know? And I guess that’s how you lo- you learn sometimes. But we do a lot of, we love iterating our process.

Dustin Winter: Obviously we’ve challenged different, you know… I came in with fresh eyes, I wanted to do some creative destruction, I guess some- what some would call. Yes. And where not everything was right on the mark, but we did find some great, like, competitive advantages by doing that, and we’re constantly doing that.

Dustin Winter: We’re constantly, the technician team and the ops team, everybody, and the sales team, it’s very collaborative. So we try to, we open, have very open real time feedback. So if, say, a couple technicians are on a residential install and they run into something that maybe could be improved on the, and maybe can be improved on the sales side, and maybe present, you know, make sure the customer is maybe a little more informed about something up front or maybe consider other different setups, ways to sell that setup Our, our technicians will reach out to sales right away on a direct line.

Dustin Winter: There’s no, like, filter. We w- our communication, we really encourage everyone to communicate across every department robustly. We encourage it. We actually expect it. And so that we’re constantly improving what we do, how we p- you know, position the sale, but then also how it went on the back end. You know, and that also plays into, uh, just the health of the business, too.

Dustin Winter: Like, you know, if we’re budgeting three hours for an install, but we’re finding that type of install is actually going five hours or something you know, that type of door. Getting that feedback up front can really help make su-sure you protect your margins and make sure you’re actually charging what you should be for that type of job.

Dustin Winter: You know, a good example is, like, low headroom doors. You know, it’s been a kind of a s- you know, uh, you know, te- you know, low headroom doors where there’s just not a lot of space on top, you know, maybe a low ceiling, a low clearance. It becomes a more complicated sit-situation. And we found over, especially the years I’ve been here, we found pretty early on, like, we thought we were charging enough for some of these, but we weren’t.

Dustin Winter: I mean, these were just taking way longer than sales was… They didn’t, they didn’t realize it. And so we’ve, uh, you know, but as we got more communication going early on, they’re like, “Hey, this, this didn’t, you know, you know, uh, this took, this took a day, over a whole day. It didn’t take three hours. It was a full day install because of the complexity of that.”

Dustin Winter: Uh, we need to make sure we’re bill- you know, charging for that. And if we’re up front with the customer, up front, it’s like, “Hey, this is kind of a unique situation. Your set up here, this is gonna take extra time,” th- you know, they’re almost always fine with that. You know, they understand. But you can’t surprise them later, so you gotta eat it.

Dustin Winter: So that’s a good example of like, hey, you- there’s gotta be good communication. And yeah, we gotta iterate what we’re doing continually. I mean, if, you know… And that’s across everything. And then, you know, as we build out more systems and technology, you know, especially with our software, then you start getting more real time job costing when it’s done, so you don’t have to like, you know…

Dustin Winter: You know, you see m- you see a lot of it, like, more proactively. You can see, uh, you can see it in aggregate over time. Like, okay, yeah, this is what our margins, what we projected when we bid it out. Here’s how it actually played out o-over time, over a sa- uh, uh, you know, a sufficient sample size. And then you can make really educated adjustments to your pricing and approach.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. But what, w-what’s a, what recently maybe comes to mind as something you experimented with and was like, “Oh, this is a, this is a way better way to do this. We should start doing this”?

Dustin Winter: Well, well, I mean, geez, it happens all the time. I think like, this isn’t necessarily on the technician side, but on the, well, on the project management piece, especially on the commercial for like larger bid projects.

Dustin Winter: You know, we really changed the way we approach the project, uh, management is in that we really broke down the different elements of how we c- of the project and how we can bill and how we can get the cash conversion cycle shorter. So it’s not, you know… And we found a lot of ways we could do that. It’s, and one is just, yeah, and this is gonna sound silly ’cause a lot of companies probably already do this, so it’s gonna sound, uh, probably, uh, a little elementary, but we weren’t, we weren’t delivering product to site, uh, you know, in, you know, in storage containers.

Dustin Winter: And I know a lot of companies already do that. We thought, “Well, you know, we’re gonna get it on site, and then when we go out to install it, and we’ll just bill it all out with the labor.” But we found is like when we have delays on a project, you know, also, you know, or which happens quite often ’cause on a larger project you have several other subcontractors you gotta dance around.

Dustin Winter: Like, you think you’re gonna be out there next week, all of a sudden some s- the site supervisor all of a sudden’s like, “Oh,” decided they’re gonna start painting in there. Well, now we can’t go in there, or all of a sudden they, you know,

Dustin Winter: the, the people are stepping over each other’s schedules. So what we just realized like, hey, we really need, just as a better practice, we found, you know, put a storage container on site is, is very marginal, very little cost. Let’s just get it to site, and then every contract we do for a commercial bid has a clause in there where we can bill out materials once they’re delivered to site So we can get that.

Dustin Winter: So that means we can order the product, lock in the price, make sure we avoid any price increases from bid, the bid time of bid, and get it out there, and then bill it immediately. So we already have that pay app in right away before the project even starts, so we can get that product at least paid for within a cycle where we’re f- you know, floating that much shorter.

Dustin Winter: You know, so… And that’s probably our biggest working capital expense is f- that floating that, the, the product. And we’ve a lot of products where we float $300,000 in product, you know, or more for one project. So, even a week of accelerating, uh, cash conversion can be a huge deal or, and especially a month or two months, you know, where if you’re floating $300,000, you know, that money just gets sucked out of the bank account.

Dustin Winter: Now you can- don’t have that working capital for another project. So you need to get that cash churning as quickly as possible. So that’s just one thing is like we’ve just like, “No, we just need to do this on pretty much every, every project and just make sure we get materials billed out right away so we don’t have…”

Dustin Winter: So ideally… And, and the nice thing about that is there’s nothing to inspect. There’s nothing, you know. So the approval part is really s- simple as well. We found that, you know, we separate the materials up front and get that billing. It’s not like it has to be, oh, is it installed right? Is there any errors?

Dustin Winter: Is there any adjustments? You know, there’s no delay. It’s just like, is it there or is it not? Is it insured or is it not? Yeah. We have our insurance. We have our container. We have the materials there. We bill it, and we, you know, then we can get paid within maybe, uh, 45 days instead of, you know, if we wait 30 days, do the project, bill it, and then you lose a month.

Dustin Winter: You know, ’cause now… And then also it gets a little more complicated ’cause now you’re, it’s, it’s gotta be multiple rounds of inspections and, and sign-offs on the work, and then the materials. It’s all lumped together. So that’s just like one little thing, but where you can just all these little things, the cash conversion cycle, you just find all these little things.

Dustin Winter: Like how to make it see if the GC can pay you via ACH instead of mail, stuff like that. You know, just all the… And it doesn’t sound like a big thing, but the mail system here in the s- Twin Cities sometimes can be fairly unreliable.

Alex Bridgeman: Also pretty risky to-

Dustin Winter: Yeah … for some of these large checks. These big checks.

Dustin Winter: If you’re waiting for a check for a couple hundred grand, yeah, it’s floating in the mail. I don’t know. I don’t feel like that-

Alex Bridgeman: If it just, you know, falls behind a desk for six months. So,

Dustin Winter: so it’s just about being proactive about these things and just… And so then you get paid, you ACH you, you know, just from the mail system, you might be getting paid at least two weeks earlier, and you just start adding up all these little things.

Dustin Winter: There’s, you know, that we’ve built out over this just in the last 12 months where we’ve really got diligent about You know, really condensing that cycle. So those are just a couple examples, and there’s several others in that space where you can really accelerate your, your cash conversion. Uh, it’s, it’s so…

Dustin Winter: You know, I, I love that concept of cash conversion ’cause I th- you know, and they- Especially

Alex Bridgeman: as a former lender, too.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. Yeah, I used to be in finance. But, you know, I… You know, there’s certain areas of our business that have actually have a negative cash conversion cycle. And when you use the word negative, you think it’s a bad thing, but that’s…

Dustin Winter: I don’t know if you know about ca- but n- Oh,

Alex Bridgeman: yeah. I, I want that as my license plate for when I register- Negative? … my car. Like N-E-G, W, you know, N-W-C.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. So it’s like, I… Like, if you don’t understand the concept, it’s like you wanna turn on that. Y- you know, so if like, I think Costco really, I think was one of the big case studies years ago, like really, like capitalized on this, is where you negotiate the best terms possible with your vendors.

Dustin Winter: So let’s say you’re net 30, but if you can turn on your inventory three times within that month, you know, they’re basically funding your working capital. So it’s negative ca- you know, it’s a negative cash conversion set up to where they’re, you know, they’re funding not only that, but they’re actually can funding working capital for other parts of the business.

Dustin Winter: It actually can… And so we can’t, it… We haven’t found a way to get to a negative cash conversion cycle on the commercial side, but ’cause of, of, uh, especially the bid projects, but we’re gonna get it as close as possible. One area where it is a po- it is a negative, a negative cash conversion, which is a positive, is like our residential doors, you know, to where You know, if we can get our doors, get good terms with our…

Dustin Winter: We have good terms with our residential door manufacturers who are dealers for, and then if we can order the door, get it quickly, a- and get it installed in like, say, all within a couple weeks, then we’re getting paid in t- two weeks at the end, end of completion. But we, you know, that, but the bill isn’t due for the doors and, and materials until then, you know, the end of that 30 cycle.

Dustin Winter: So you’re actually getting out ahead of, you know, when it’s due versus when you’re getting paid. And it-

Alex Bridgeman: Do you charge a deposit to

Dustin Winter: the customer? And then that’s the other part. So then y- we charge fift- you know, we make sure we get 50% down to protect us. And so you’re getting 50% down, which covers the material.

Dustin Winter: So you’re actually, you’re getting paid for the materials before you order them, and you get, and you get invoiced for them from the… So what it does is say it’s kind of a secret bank for a lot of, if you manage it right, a secret b- like, kind of like a invisible bank for your business if you can make sure you’re taking, getting deposits and making sure you’re moving quickly, getting product quickly, getting in quickly to where that can actually help fund the other parts of the business.

Dustin Winter: And it does. It helps us. I mean, we’ve had to borrow, you know, n- not a lot bec- uh, for working capital because we found creative ways like that to create working capital with other revenue buckets of the business. So residential can actually, like residential doors helps support commercial install. So residential install supports commercial install for working capital.

Dustin Winter: I mean, not directly, but I think you get what I’m trying to say. But as a… It’s, it’s somewhat, it’s fungible I guess to some degree for, as, as, as a business to where the more places you can find that where you’re getting paid immediately or even in advance when it comes to a deposit, that’s great. And we get deposits on commercial too, but there’s a lot of projects you don’t, can’t, like especially government pro- projects.

Dustin Winter: They, they don’t do down payments. Right. Or, or even some of the larger private projects, a lot of times it, it’s just you gotta do it through the payout process and progress billing. So if we’re doing maybe a more of a one-off rolling steel door for a facility and it’s not managed by a g- GC, yeah, you know, we’ll, we’ll try to get something down and make sure we’re protected in case like if they do back out, we’re not stuck with a custom rolling steel door cut to their…

Dustin Winter: that we’d have to just throw in the dumpster basically, and it’d be a shame and eat the cost. We, we gotta make sure we’re at least getting a deposit for that. I mean, there’s protections we have, but you never wanna get into that situation

Alex Bridgeman: And shifting gears a little bit, you, you mentioned acquiring a smaller commercial business.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: And you’ve looked at lots of different small garage businesses that you might pull into Metro. Like, how do you think about doing tuck-in acquisitions around Minneapolis or just around Minnesota? I

Dustin Winter: think– I mean, I think there’s a lot of great companies for here. And so when I, when I think of like great tuck-ins, it’s more like companies that I really admire.

Dustin Winter: Like, there’s some really great companies. Like Automated Door Service, they were operating since the ’80s, and just, they had such strong relationships with their commercial customers, and just there’s so much trust there and, and relationship. And there’s quite a few, you know. I think they’re companies maybe that are Traditionally seen as too small for like a private equity firm to roll into a platform or a strategic to be interested in or even all, you know.

Dustin Winter: But we love it because it’s just such great like underpinnings to the business because it’s so, so relational, and if you can transition in a way to where you can maintain that and make sure you have key people that come over and are on board, they fit in our culture, then it’s like, yeah, this is… You know, it could be a great opportunity for everybody, including the customers.

Dustin Winter: So like with Automated Door Service, yeah, it’s great for the customers because we can, we can offer a lot more different services, more flexibility because of our size of our team. But also just we can actually do better pricing because our pricing multiple is better because we do so much more volume.

Dustin Winter: So we can do a lot. Or we had, uh, one customer we serve, uh, was, uh, uh, with Automated Door Service that came over, and Automated worked on some of their locations here locally, but they also had locations in Saint Cloud, and well, they just didn’t have a big enough team to, uh, be, you know, be able to jump out to Saint Cloud whenever something was needed, so.

Dustin Winter: But we have people out near Saint Cloud , so it’s like so right out of the gate we’re like, “You know, we can also service your facilities out in, in Saint Cloud.” And they’ve been asking for years for ADS to do that, and we’re like, “Yeah, we can do that now.” So now we’re do- now we’re servicing all their properties.

Dustin Winter: And but yeah, I think the opportunity is there, and there’s lots of great companies, and it can be a real win-win too because we can pay a little more than maybe your– you know, we… Well, we can. We can pay more for that opportunity because we can save a lot on some of the duplicative costs and better pricing we can get because of volume.

Dustin Winter: So we can pay a little more. So a seller, you know, maybe has an EBITDA of maybe it’s, you know, it’s not really nothing to write home about maybe in the broader business community. But we can almost 4X that right out of the gate just from the efficiencies that we have here. And so the multiple we pay is very generous, but our effective multiple for us is very low actually, you know, because we might be able to pay five, six times to that company owner who’s looking for exit who would normally only maybe get a three multiple.

Dustin Winter: But for us, we can effectively, once we Really kind of do a pro forma analysis of it, you know, after, you know, we consolidate, uh, core functions, we can actually effectively maybe it’s only a two we’re actually paying for what we’re getting. So-

Alex Bridgeman: And you could probably borrow for most or all of that after you’ve proven that with a couple deals, then you go to your lender and say, “Here’s what we’ve done the previous two or three deals.

Alex Bridgeman: This is what happened- Yeah … and we think it’s gonna hap- we’re gonna– we’re planning on that again here.”

Dustin Winter: Oh, absolutely. I know other business owners that are, you know, they’ve definitely capitalized in that. Uh, y- you know, if you have a good banking relationship, especially once you show a track record. Uh, the nice thing about maybe looking at companies maybe on the lower size of the scale as far as size, it’s, um, a lot of times we can just pay cash, you know.

Dustin Winter: So you don’t have to continue to build any debt and keep, you know, you can keep your leverage lower. Whereas maybe if you– so if you’re buying a company maybe with three hundred in EBITDA, three hundred thousand in EBITDA You know, you don’t have money, don’t have to take as much debt as if you have a company with maybe a 1.2 million in EBITDA or something like that.

Dustin Winter: If you see an opportunity like that, it’s like, yeah, it’s a great company, and they’re already hitting some hit, you know, hitting a lot of the cylinders already firing. But, you know, you’re gonna pay full multiple on that. And guess what? Then you maybe got an additional, you know, four, four to five million in debt.

Dustin Winter: And debt can, you know, I, I’m not a big– despite working in lending for fifteen years, I’m, you know, debt can be a real anchor on your neck for one, just if you hit tough times or you have to, you know, you run into whatever issues. You know, when you’re in business, you’re always gonna run into some kind of snag somewhere, come out of the blue.

Dustin Winter: But also it can– I think, I feel like it can cramp your creativity. So you can get a little scared on that creative destruction that I really like, where you’re trying new things, experimenting with, you know, incrementally experimenting new things. Well, it feels a little more dangerous when you got a big anchor around your neck.

Dustin Winter: I think leverage can really, you know, make it hard to feel creative- Yeah … ’cause you’re, you feel more protective. And I think there’s great opportunities, you know, where you take on that debt. But I personally, I think for us, we really wanna just be careful about that. I mean, we could do, we can do that where, you know, we’re looking for some opportunities here locally, but I feel like some of the best opportunities are being overlooked ’cause I think they’re, quote unquote, too small.

Dustin Winter: You know, I, and we just see it differently.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah.

Dustin Winter: Or not differently. I think a lot of number of people see this as well. But I guess just depends on what your appetite, uh, is and where you’re at in your growth cycle, you know.

Alex Bridgeman: And especially when you’ve had a couple– you’ve already done a couple of these.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: And you can go to an owner and, you know, here’s the phone number of the owner that we bought their business last year, and it was a similar size. Go talk to them. Yeah. You know, they’ll tell you how the experience was, like you’ll have a reputation that you can build on. I think

Dustin Winter: so. I mean, even that opportunity came to us through reputation, so it wasn’t something we were, we found or used a broker.

Dustin Winter: I like working outside of that broker framework. I really like off-market things and where it’s a little more– it feels more evenly paced and collaborative. I’ll just leave it at that. Yeah, reputation’s a big thing. And people, yeah, they wanna know that their, maybe their legacy isn’t gonna get, you know, just kind of blown up or thrown away and make sure the people and, and their customers are still gonna get taken care of and And so yeah, your reputation matters, you know?

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Well, I mean, that seems like the owners have a, are us- usually one of their biggest concerns is their team, ’cause they-

Dustin Winter: Yeah …

Alex Bridgeman: first off, they care about their team. Yeah. But they also worked hard to assemble this team over many years often to get the, kinda the right mix of people to- Yeah … for their business.

Alex Bridgeman: And so like, I worked really hard for, you know, to get all these people excited to work in my business.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. And I feel as an owner, you feel that kind of, that responsibility. It’s, ’cause you get people, especially may- maybe if you’ve gone through lean times or tough times, you know, there’s, you, you have people who buy into the vision and, and you know what you wanna do, and you want to, you know, you wanna honor that.

Dustin Winter: Like, folks really, you know, we have a lot of folks that really, you know, we really worked hard to grow and, and, and, and evolve kind of, you know, as a company. And oh, I think it, yeah, I mean, the last thing I’d ever wanna do is just like have new owners show up one day and then like, “Hey, surprise,” and then have everything change.

Dustin Winter: K- I’m open about these things with folks. I don’t wanna… We have no plans to exit, but we wanna keep growing. But yeah, we, we wanna make sure we take care of our stakeholders, and the stakeholders are all through the company at, you know, in every type of position, and we’re really trying to find really highly engaged folks and, you know, so we wanna be purposeful about what we do.

Dustin Winter: I don’t know if that answered your question.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Um, what, what do you, so for the second half of this year, what are you excited to, to get done? What are the key projects you’re looking forward to?

Dustin Winter: It seems like it always takes up the oxygen a little bit, but like software. Man, I, you know, that’s been a ba- that’s been a battle-

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we’ve talked about that one before

Dustin Winter: like to some degree it’s been a battle like my entire working life. Like, I think with- through all the different banks I worked with, it, I was thinking about this the other day. I feel like almost every two years for the last, you know, 25 years I’ve had some sort of been involved with a company or bank upgrading their software or trying to get something that actually works, and it’s just, it’s so frustrating and I know a lot of business owners probably feel similarly, but because I’ve talked with a lot of them trying to find better solutions.

Dustin Winter: I’ve talked to so many people. I’ve flown around the country to see what other folks are using and look over their shoulder. Does this actually work, you know? And that’s really tough. It’s, yeah, I don’t know. It’s, it’s a strange dynamic. I, I’m trying to figure it out. I mean, I’m not sure if, if you’ve talked to anybody about this, but it’s one of those things where I think some of these companies build great software and then companies spend years just trying to figure out what it is they built and how to use it.

Dustin Winter: And like, gosh, there’s got to be a better way to onboard this stuff or, or dial it in. And I do feel like we finally found a really good partner with… We’re working with Acumatica.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I saw a sticker on your guitar.

Dustin Winter: Yeah, no. Yeah. You know, we had some challenges with like our VAR, our value added reseller, which is like a third party that optimizes for Acumatica for specific industries, and what we found is for us it works better to go straight to Acumatica, and that’s not o- I don’t think that’s available to everyone, so I’m not even sure if we’re supposed to be talking about it, but, uh-

Alex Bridgeman: We can cut it, we can cut it later.

Dustin Winter: Maybe. Ah, whatever. But w- look, you got to feel it out, and I think you can’t do too much due diligence when it comes to software, ’cause we did do a software upgrade when I first got here ’cause we had hardly anything, and the first one I wish we’d spent more time ’cause then we had to do it, it didn’t work out, and over the course of a couple years we were like, “Oh, this is not gonna be our end-all be-all software.”

Dustin Winter: And then that’s when we did a second round, like due diligence. Let’s find what our long-term partner’s gonna be, and we s- we spent a lot of time and a lot of energy and, and, and landed on Acumatica. And it was, it was kind of between kind of your, your folks, the folks people are mostly looking at in the service industry, including ServiceTitan was right there as one of the options, and we really dug in on ServiceTitan.

Dustin Winter: But at the end of the day, we had just very specific needs and long-term, and a long-term vision that just felt like Acumatic was the best fit for us.

Alex Bridgeman: Especially for commercial stuff too, right?

Dustin Winter: Yeah. Especially with all the project stuff. They have a real, some really good project tools and You kinda gotta build it out a little more over time, but once you have it locked in, it’s really great.

Dustin Winter: And also I, I, I really love their pricing structure as well, where I think a lot of the– most of the software companies are doing kind of that SaaS model, membership model, where you, you add three technicians, now your price went up. And, you know, you… Which kinda was a concern for us ’cause we wanted to grow and scale and make acquisitions, so I had to kinda try to budget.

Dustin Winter: I was like, “Okay, now if I add 12 technicians due to an acquisition of another company, what’s my pricing now?” And then– and sometimes it can jump just dramatically. With ServiceTitan, and, and I get it. It’s– That’s their model. I don’t begrudge it. But what I really loved about Acumatica was it, there was incremental increase for volume and users, but it’s very, very minimal to almost non-existent.

Dustin Winter: So I am sure different people are gonna have different pricing, but I’m just kinda us- ballpark. But like if your pricing’s the same, around fifty thousand a year, if you add like four or five users, it’s still fifty thousand a year. But maybe just maybe a few hundred bucks more for this and that. But it’s– I really like the idea of an overhead cost being able to be diminished as you grow, and that’s how you get economies of scale.

Dustin Winter: And I l- I, there’s something I do bristle about that an overhead type expense like that kinda tr- follows you. It’s almost like it’s chasing you as you grow. I don’t like it. But I know what it… It is what it is. I’m not– I’m, you know, I don’t, I don’t have any hard feelings or anything. But I just love the idea that Acumatica was a little more stable, and we could diminish that ’cause that is the idea when you’re scaling.

Dustin Winter: You know, you want your overhead to stay somewhat flat as you grow, so you’re bringing more of your gross profit to the bottom, and that’s kinda what we want. So over time, you’re actually making more of every dollar or keeping more of ev-every dollar you earn. So I just like that model as well. So there was– But there was other things, and I think the working relationship with Acumatica just felt just like a better fit with us, just personalities, culture, whatever it might you wanna call it.

Dustin Winter: But it just felt more natural But yeah, software, boy, I tell you what. So the big exci– This is a long, long curve here, but, but basically what I’m excited about is, like, w-we’re just really, over the last, especially over the last handful of months, really been able to, like, fine-tune some great workflows and, and things.

Dustin Winter: And we actually have a project we’re working on with, uh, with Acumatic right now to really build out some even neater things and ones that we were kinda dreaming of, and they said, “You know, we can do that in, like, 90 days. Let’s put it together.” And so I’m really excited between now and the end of the year to get that dialed in to some tools across different departments and get, get things really stream- streamlined, get our data more fine-tuned in real time.

Dustin Winter: So I’m really excited about getting that dialed in.

Alex Bridgeman: One thing that I’m trying to do is use stuff like– Like Fable 5 has been really good for building apps-

Dustin Winter: Okay …

Alex Bridgeman: and stuff like, and, like, little, like, smaller functions. Have you tried any tools making your own custom apps or things to kind of tighten around the edges that maybe Acumatic is slower to do that you might be able to do faster with an AI tool?

Dustin Winter: We, we have experimented with that a little bit here and there, but not, I wouldn’t say very much. Uh, well, what we found is we’ll build something, and then we’ll find out Acumatic can actually do it without us having to build that out. Or we’ll have a… Or you know what I mean? That’s, that’s- Or it’s like-

Dustin Winter: fair, yeah … it’s one of those things where it is such a robust software that sometimes you really gotta maybe sometimes even talk to a couple layers within the different people at the company to where you’re like, “Oh, actually, I think we can do that without you having to build, like, add this extra app and expense on and actually streamline it.”

Dustin Winter: Oh, that’s great. And so we– There’s been a few times where we’ve done that, where we built something out as a stopgap, and then they’re like, “Oh, no, we can do that. You don’t have to build it out.” You know, but yeah, we have a few things like that. Like, one is, you know, we, we used, like, GoFormz for a little while.

Dustin Winter: You know, just some different form- like some different apps and add-ons that just add a lot of neat functionality. And, and even with Acumatica, some things they do, there’s just certain things that they have, like, kind of partners that work really well on the app side that it’s like, hey, it’s best to actually use their thing.

Dustin Winter: It’s really dialed in. And, you know, maybe it doesn’t cost a whole lot more. Just that’s probably the best way to go, and there’s a few of those w- we use. But we haven’t really done any custom stuff. Too much of it, I guess, really, or I’m not real familiar with that, what, the one you were mentioning.

Alex Bridgeman: Oh, uh, Claude Fable 5.

Alex Bridgeman: It’s one of their-

Dustin Winter: Oh, yeah, yeah … sort of latest- Oh, Claude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Alex Bridgeman: It’s pretty powerful.

Dustin Winter: Is it?

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it

Dustin Winter: can- Well, I don’t think we got a Claude person here. Maybe we need, maybe need to hire somebody. Or if you know somebody, let me know, ’cause I do think there’s a lot of opportunities in that area to build out our own stuff that, yeah, I don’t know.

Dustin Winter: Some things we really dove in real quickly, like especially with the AI stuff, and it’s working well. Other things it feel, it kind of, there’s the sense that maybe some things aren’t ready for primetime-

Alex Bridgeman: Hmm …

Dustin Winter: and, uh, maybe they’re not as reliable as we had hoped. And I, maybe it’s different with Claude, but we’ve tried it with other AI systems that where it’s, it just doesn’t feel like it’s, like it, you know…

Dustin Winter: I don’t know. It,

Alex Bridgeman: it’ll- Have you tried any of the CSR-type tools or anything like that?

Dustin Winter: CSRs, uh-

Alex Bridgeman: Like the answering the phone.

Dustin Winter: Yeah, so that’s one we demoed, and that, that’s actually a great example where we found a great AI phone for… And then we just wanted it for after-hours, ’cause, you know, we have a call center, ’cause we need it for emergency service after hours.

Dustin Winter: And, you know, we don’t want our folk- we want our folks to be able to sleep at night and not have to do that internally, so we, you know, we, we get that out to an answering service. But then even the answering services can be somewhat unreliable sometimes. So we’re always looking for a better mousetrap, but, and so we looked at a demo that was just, actually it was amazing.

Dustin Winter: The functionality, the quality with the demo was great But then when we asked for references and when we checked references, the customer service was great, everything was great. But what we found there was there was still a lot of like folks saying, like, “We still have– It’s not a set it and forget it, and you really gotta keep an eye on it,” ’cause like sometimes it kinda just doesn’t work like quite right or the data’s unreliable, like an address or whatever it is, or a phone n- whatever it might be.

Alex Bridgeman: It could put it in the wrong-

Dustin Winter: Yeah. And then if you’re not double-checking it, and then we got folks, technicians, you know, it goes to the schedule, then the technician goes out y- and you’re at the wrong place. Customer– Now you’re late for the customer. I mean, there’s just a lot of different things that, that could go wrong there.

Dustin Winter: But even then, we even had some folks say it was glitching. Like every once in a blue moon, it will almost like start thinking for itself and like talking to somebody. I think I was talking to somebody where they were like, customer’s talking to them, just out of the blue, it starts trying to give them away, give them like a, like a f- a free book.

Dustin Winter: Not a book on the industry or b- business or anything. It was- A book

Alex Bridgeman: you wrote or anything. It’s just a-

Dustin Winter: No. It was just like a random, it– something got– well, some wire got crossed up and like, I don’t know. And so it’s just like- That

Alex Bridgeman: makes you nervous, yeah.

Dustin Winter: It does. It– So it’s like, so we’ve kinda taken a little slower approach on some of that stuff.

Dustin Winter: And also, look, I think, I think emotions are high on a, a lot of this to where, you know, I’ve heard some, uh, customer– There was a customer of another door company that I know who a customer basically said because they were using AI now for their answering service, that they’re no longer gonna do business with them.

Dustin Winter: They canceled all their services, and it’s just like, oh my gosh. So there’s a lot of passions, and I understand it. There’s a lot of… this is all moving so fast. I think there’s politics involved, and there’s emotion. Uh, it, you know, it gets kinda, I don’t wanna get in the weeds on that stuff. I feel like we’re, we’re gonna be a little more cautious and, and beyond that, we really like a human touch.

Dustin Winter: Even if it is maybe an answering service, it is still a human. And I think for right now, we kinda actually, we’re just gonna like Keep that as a differentiation for now. I know, again, our customers really love when they call in during the day. We really… Our intake does such a phenomenal job of just, you know, trying to kind of diagnose things and have a great conversation.

Dustin Winter: And I think that’s, our customers love that, and we don’t wanna get away from that during the day. But even for after hours, maybe it’s just, I don’t know if it’s ready yet. I want all the bugs out before I, I, I… You know, feels like there’s still some things it needs to figure out.

Alex Bridgeman: Well, we don’t need to-

Dustin Winter: Is this just me or, I don’t know.

Dustin Winter: Well, yeah. What are you hearing from other folks? I mean-

Alex Bridgeman: I think others have been, like, more disenchanted by the early versions of these answering tools.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: More often than not.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. I think I’m gonna keep looking at it, but that being said, I’m not in no hurry on that. I really do like a human touch, and I mean, it’s way less expensive, and it, and if it, it does get to a point where it’s set, like, kind of a more set it and forget it and it’s running reliably, I mean, I think…

Dustin Winter: Again, I don’t think folks will begr- they don’t really begrudge us having an answering service in general, you know, because they understand, hey, we gotta sleep, too. But I think-

Alex Bridgeman: It’s also common in, like, medical, too. Like, you’ll have an after-hours- Is it? … answering service that’s a third-party outsource that is more for triage.

Alex Bridgeman: Like, if a patient’s trying to call. Like, my mom’s a family physician, so they, the family clinic that she owned and ran, there was an answering service that if a patient of hers called at, like, 8:00 PM about something, there was a, this service that was trained for, to be- Mm-hmm … for medical triage, and they could tell the patient, “Oh, okay.

Alex Bridgeman: You’re, you’re fine. We’ll schedule you in the morning,” or, “Go to the urgent care,” or, “Go to emergency room,” and they could help kind of coordinate.

Dustin Winter: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: So I, I think you’re right. I don’t think there’s, like, a begrudge against answering services generally.

Dustin Winter: Yeah. But the AI stuff has touched you- Yeah … a little bit.

Alex Bridgeman: You gotta position it

Dustin Winter: right. Look, I just … I think for right now we’re just gonna hold tight on that. I, I don’t know. Yeah. And I do think even with the answering services outside of AI, I think there’s other things to consider like local, overseas. Some of the local end up- S- subbing out overseas and you’re like, you know.

Dustin Winter: But so- Yeah … it ends up overseas anyways. Think one of the models we really like is where, and your answering service has a dedicated team, where it’s not just a different person every single time and it’s bouncing all over the country or even a- around the world, I think some people. And it’s like if you can get a core group that where it’s at least a s- core group in the answering team that is kind of assigned to your account, they do tend to learn more as you engage with them and develop your script and your expectations and have a working relationship.

Dustin Winter: They can actually start learning some of that, things that, like doing kind of a, a light triage like we do on intake. We’re not, we’re not gonna fix a door over intake, but there are some really key things to ask and maybe suggest or, you know, maybe it’s just a photo eyes alignment and, and you can kinda figure that out sometimes pretty simply.

Dustin Winter: And, and we’ll usually walk someone through that so, you know, they’re not, we don’t have to charge them to go out and do something that basically just have to move a, twist a little, you know, photo eye maybe a quarter inch to the left and it works. Like, you know, we actually try to get out ahead of that so the customer’s like, “Hey, you know, we, we don’t wanna come out there and charge you for that.”

Dustin Winter: I think, I mean, there’s different ways of looking at it. Some folks just wanna go out, get out in front of the customer. But, you know, if it’s something like that, um, I mean, and then even then we’ll ask like, “Hey, do you still want us to come out? We can still lube and adjust your door, maybe look at other things.”

Dustin Winter: And, and they’ll s- some oftentimes still like, “Yeah, why don’t you come out and check everything else out?” But, but sometimes like, “Oh, no. Really, thank you.” And they’ll… And then that you’ve built a long-term customer, and then next time something more serious happens, they’ll call you and you can get on it.

Dustin Winter: But, but yeah, having a dedicated team I think is something we really like, even in your answering service if there’s a way they can structure it. And there, and there’s some answering services that do that well, so.

Alex Bridgeman: It’s a good place to close, Dustin. Oh, okay. Thanks for coming on the podcast. This was a ton of fun.

Alex Bridgeman: I appreciate it.

Dustin Winter: Alex, I’ve- I don’t

Alex Bridgeman: wanna take up too much more of your time.

Dustin Winter: This was great. No, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely.

Alex Bridgeman: Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Think Like an Owner. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review and telling a friend to help more folks find Think Like an Owner. For full episode transcripts and our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at tlaopodcast.com.