From the PGA Tour to the Trades – John Peterson – Founder of Westoplex Garage – EP.269

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:01:10) – John’s career as a pro golfer
(00:14:53) – Pivoting into the garage door business
(00:23:48) – Epoxy vs. concrete floors
(00:25:36) – Latest tech innovations in garages
(00:27:53) – The self-storage market
(00:33:05) – Building a new customer funnel
(00:36:48) – Training new technicians
(00:37:55) – Recruiting talent
(00:40:31) – What to look for in hires
(00:43:38) – Why people leave the industry
(00:48:02) – Opening a Baton Rouge office
(00:52:35) – Growing pains
(00:55:17) – What are you most excited about in the next year?

Alex Bridgeman: John, thank you for coming on the podcast. This podcast, Think Like an Owner, is focused on ambitious CEOs and how they grow companies. You’ve been a part of a lot of different unique organizations as a golfer, talking about flying, and now garage doors, which each are their own unique universe. But what ties them all together for you? 

John Peterson: I think entrepreneurship really ties everything together for me. I’ve always had that sort of mindset, whether it be playing professional golf. As a professional golfer, you are your own entrepreneur. You are the CEO of your own company. You’ve got caddies, you’ve got trainers, you’ve got these people that help you perform at your best, and it’s up to you to pick who helps you perform the best. So, when you’re playing as a young man right out of college, as a professional golfer, you’re usually broke, and I was as well. There are not many guys that sign huge deals and are flush with cash to go make the best of themselves immediately. There’s maybe 10 or 15 guys in the country that come out every year that have that sort of backing. My situation was different. In 2011, I turned pro out of LSU, and I signed a very small $50,000 sponsorship deal with Titleist. Well, I’ve got apartment rent at 1300 a month. I’ve got other bills. I’ve got caddies, trainers. I’ve got just living expenses in general. So, $50,000, when you have a $1,500 mini tour entry fee, where you’re basically gambling for 140 guys’ entry fees at these tournaments. So, they pile all that money together, and then they pay one through ten, and after ten, it really falls off. So you’ve got to beat 130 guys really to just make your money back. So, if you don’t, you go broke pretty quick, and that’s what happened with me. I turned pro in the fall of ’11, and by the time March rolled around the next year, I was down to $300 or $400. And that was when I really learned about myself as an individual. You hear people talk about being broke, and you hear about entrepreneurs going broke. And if you respond in the correct way to that situation, usually you’ll be successful the rest of your life. If you respond in the wrong way, usually you end up selling insurance or you work at a used car dealership. I mean, it’s make or break at that situation. And it was my birthday in spring of 2012. I was at a mini tour event in Orlando, and I was down to my last dollar. I just missed the cut. I had driven there from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn’t have the money to fly. Missed the cut by one. So I’m driving from the Atlantic ocean all the way back to Baton Rouge in my borrowed sister’s car that had no AC. I didn’t have room for a hotel room. So, I pulled into a rest stop on the side of the highway, slept in the car, got back in or woke up, and then was digging for quarters in the seats to to get a breakfast burrito at McDonald’s, like halfway back to Baton Rouge. And I got back to Baton Rouge literally on fumes. I had all these bills that were stacking up, and I had already paid for a Monday qualifier, for the PGA tour event in Memphis. So, with the last $200 or $300 I have, I drove to Memphis and got through that qualifier, made the cut, made $10 or $12,000. That got me enough money to qualify for the US Open, which was the next week. I get through that. I finished fourth in the US Open. That paid $280,000. And in the span of six weeks, I went from having nothing to having enough money for the down payment on my first house. And so I think that little turn of events, that six-week stretch kind of set me up for the mindset that I have now with business, where I’m protecting capital and protecting the company, but we’re also spending our marketing dollars and the free cash flow that we have in order to expand, so we don’t get like that again. But I think the background of that taught me a lot, as I’m in my late 30s now, 15 years ago to where I’m able to position the company in a better place to achieve success long-term. And I’m really grateful for going broke back then. I don’t think I would have the skills and the financial responsibility that I do as an owner of this company now without it. 

Alex Bridgeman: Was that a common kind of mindset to take on or experience that you found when meeting other golfers along these different tournaments? Were there a lot of similar stories of that struggle and have you found that kind of peer mindset often? 

John Peterson: Yeah, it’s very common with guys in their early 20s coming out of college and trying to make it on mini tours. And by mini tours, I mean, for the listeners, mini tours are basically glorified gambling games, as I said before. You’re paying for- you’re playing for each other’s entry fees. And you pay $1,400 and a hotel and food. You’re really racking up $2,300, $2,400 a week, depending on how you get there. And if you don’t finish in the top 10, tenth basically gets you your money back. You’re in the green and black on fifth, six. First is 20 grand. And you’re competing against 140, 150 guys. So, everybody is in the same boat at that point coming out of college, and it’s extremely difficult. It’s the ultimate entrepreneurship test, in my opinion. And you’ll find out real quick if you’re good enough to make it out there, because you’ll either run out of money, or you won’t, and you’ll have some sort of windfall where you play good for, like I did, for two or three weeks, and you’ll make it. But usually, those guys that live that life, they don’t last more than a couple of years. 

Alex Bridgeman: It seems like folks will either have that experience and won’t eventually learn how to put savings away for kind of a rainy-day fund, or they will embrace that and they’ll… you’ll have a scarcity mindset to some degree, like this is all that I got, we need to protect as much as possible. Elements of both seem, there’s probably a healthy balance in the middle. But what was kind of your mindset? So, if you get a large windfall like that from a tournament for a period of time, knowing that you were close to broke six weeks ago, what does that do for the way that you manage money in your own personal runway and tournaments you enter after that? 

John Peterson: So, when I was at school at LSU, I didn’t have the correct major. I wasn’t financially educated on how to save for income tax or what the government was going to throw at me for the next year. I took the basic core classes of accounting and econ and stuff like that, but as a student athlete, you’re just trying to stay eligible. You’ve got workouts at workouts at 6 a.m. You’ve got practice, and then you have class, and you’re just trying to stay eligible to compete because you’re, yeah, I’m there to get a degree, I’m there to graduate, but really my main goal is to turn professional and try to make it as a professional golfer. And that’s the mindset that a student athlete has at a big school, at a school where you’re expected to represent your university and your state after you graduate. And not every athlete has that because some of them know that they probably don’t have a chance as a pro, so they spend more time on the school side, and they get meaningful majors, and they move on about their life after that. And they have a great experience as a student athlete. Me, I was trying to do my best playing golf in order to set myself up for a professional golf career. So, when I did have that windfall at the US Open, I immediately had to be counseled and mentored on how to save for the massive tax bill that I was going to get in 2013. And that US Open happened to be in California. So you make $300,000 in a state like California. Well, I had a guy tell me, well, you’re going to pay half of that because California is 13% state income tax, and now you’re in a tax bracket where they’re going to take 35% because you’re literally the worst person to make 300 grand. You’re a single 23-year-old male, and you’re self-employed, like you’re going to get smoked. And so you’re going to get hammered. So, I’m glad I had that advice immediately afterwards, because as a 23-year-old with $300,000, when you log into your Chase account, you’re thinking, I can do whatever I want. I’m in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Like it’s free to live here. It’s super cheap. So instead of buying cars and doing stupid things with that money, I put 20% down on a small house, a $200,000 house, and then I rented a bedroom out to another guy who paid me rent every month and he basically covered my mortgage. So, I was able to save the hundred thousand dollars that I would owe the government. I had a house, and this friend of mine was renting a room, and I was living almost for free in that house. But I did have good counsel. I did have good mentors, especially in my younger professional golf playing days, that helped me fiscally manage what I had. And I’m grateful for that because if I wouldn’t have had those people telling me to put back large sums of money like that, who knows what I would have done with it as a 23-year-old in Baton Rouge. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, you never know what can happen there. What happened with the rest of your golf career? 

John Peterson: From 2012, after that Open, that made me enough money to qualify for what’s called the Korn Ferry Tour now. That’s basically the minor leagues of golf, of professional golf. You have mini tours, that’s the single A of golf. And then you have, they don’t really have a double A. They have a triple A, it’s called the Korn Ferry Tour. And then they have the PGA Tour. The Korn Ferry Tour, the purses were at the time half a million bucks to a million dollars per tournament. You can actually make a living as a single person on that tour. For 2013, I qualified for that and played that year. I ended up winning the money list on that tour and getting my PGA tour card for 2014. So, from 2014 to 2018, I played the PGA Tour, and then I had wrist surgery on both wrists. I hit a tree root in Kansas in 2018 and had to have two torn ligaments repaired in my right wrist, and I never came back the same. So I lost speed. I was out six months. When I came back, I wasn’t as fast. And at that point, I had gotten married and had two kids. And it was very obvious at that point that I didn’t want to travel 30 weeks a year. I didn’t want to be gone. I didn’t want to be, quote unquote, deployed for 65% of the year. And I’d made the decision to pivot away from professional golf in June of 2019. And that was a nine-year professional golf career that probably could have been better. But at the same time, I learned enough about entrepreneurship, business, money, people, that I was able to move forward. And that’s a really hard thing to do for professional athletes, especially if they don’t make enough money during their time playing, to come to the real world and try to make it outside of it. You have guys every year that you see documentaries on that blow all their money while they’re playing, and then they’re done and they’re not good enough or they’re hurt. They can’t play anymore. And they’re broke in a barbershop in Alabama. I think JaMarcus Russell, one of our notorious LSU quarterbacks, they did a 30 for 30 on him, and he made $70 or $80 million in the NFL. And he was broke three years later. So fiscally, not responsible. But I was able to pivot away from golf. And it took a couple of years before I finally found my feet again. But that was my professional golf career in a nutshell. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, so Antonio Brown is our most recent notable example. He’s our Russell. 

John Peterson: Yeah, well, he’s somehow keeping himself relevant with all of his tweets and whatever he throws out there. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, supposedly he’s not even in the country anymore. But yeah, his notoriety, I think, is numbered. So how did garage doors become a part of your life then? 

John Peterson: All right, so from 2019, after I was done playing, there was a span in there from ’19 to ’22 where I was figuring it out. I was doing whatever I could to make a dollar because I’ve got kids, I’ve got a house, I’ve got a wife. And I had some money saved up from professional golf. So, there was a point where we were flipping houses, and I didn’t know anything about flipping houses. I didn’t know anything about electrical or plumbing or putting siding on or trimming trees, any of this stuff. But in order for us to make the most on each house, we did a lot of it ourselves. So COVID in 2020 and then 2021, we were buying $200,000 houses, fixing them up, flipping them, just like you’ve heard a million people talk about, but it was making me enough money and us enough money and teaching me enough about trades, and I learned a lot of it on YouTube. Like you can learn brain surgery on YouTube. It is quite the tool as a house flipper So we were flipping these houses, learning stuff on YouTube, doing basic electrical, basic plumbing, drywall, cutting walls down, whatever it took in order to keep advancing, keep learning, keep my family afloat, without digging into my investments or my 401k or my stuff with the tour, the retirement accounts. So I did that for a couple of years. And then one day in 2022, our garage door spring breaks on our door. And I don’t know anything about garage doors. We’ve flipped houses, we’ve done that, but we’ve never messed with the doors.  

Alex Bridgeman: Was it the gunshot sound that you’re talking about earlier?

John Peterson: It was. And when that spring breaks, that’s what it sounds like. It sounds like someone just shot a 12 gauge in your garage, and you’ll hear it. So I wasn’t home. I was actually working on a house in Weatherford 45 minutes away, doing some tiling in a bathroom. And so, my wife calls me, and she’s like, hey, our garage door is broken, I can’t get my car out. What do I do? I was like, well, I’m 45 minutes away. Why don’t you call the sticker by the clicker, which is I’m sure you’ve seen them before, these companies will leave, whoever worked on it last, they will leave the sticker right by the LiftMaster clicker or the genie clicker. So, she calls this company with the sticker by the clicker, and they come out and they give her a $2,200 quote to fix a spring. Our part cost, now that I know this, our part cost on the spring is $22. So, I didn’t know this at the time, obviously, but I was like, that sounds high. That sounds like a high price, just on common sense alone. Call someone else. So she had to pay $80 for a trip charge just to get this guy to leave. I’m like, okay, red flag, like what’s up with this industry? The next guy comes out, here in Fort Worth, $1,900. I’m like, what is going on? I know just looking at parts alone, they’re not going to have to replace the opener. The motor’s fine. The door’s fine. It’s just the stuff that moves the door. So I’m like, kick him out of the house. We got to call someone else. So, she kicks him out of the house, and he leaves, calls a third guy, and he did it for $950. Same exact job. And that was fair. I figured that that was a fair price for his time. He’s a commission-based person. The company makes their money. I get it. You got to pay people to do a good job. So, at this point, I’m mad, and I drive back from Weatherford to meet this guy 45 minutes down the road. And I get there and he’s wrapping up the job. And I just start talking to him about the business, about what he buys parts for, about how they how they market, all of these questions, because I was curious, how can there be a $1,300 difference in the same job, and the $900 job still makes you enough money to where it’s worth it for you. So, I get very curious with this guy, and he ends up sitting there for about an hour and a half and telling me a little more than he probably should have about the industry. And so my wheels are turning at this point. I’m like, well, I’m over here flipping these houses, played golf. I’ve got a ton of connections around town. I was born and raised here. I know everybody here. I wonder if I could do this. I’m fairly handy at this point. So that night goes by, and I can’t sleep. I’m like, man, there’s an opportunity here. I know it. This seems like there’s some dishonest companies in this town that are trying to rob people. And so, I saved this guy’s number, and I called him the next day. His name was Chris. And I said, Chris, this is John Peterson. You fixed our door yesterday. He’s like, oh yeah, I remember. How you doing, man? I was like, well, I’m doing fine. I couldn’t sleep last night. I was just wondering about this industry. I was wondering if you wanted to go into it with me. And he’s like… it’s like he’s seen a ghost. He didn’t answer my question for four or five seconds. And then he just said yes. I was like, he doesn’t know me from Adam. We’ve talked for an hour and a half and he just said yes. So we talk another five minutes. I hang up. I formed the LLC that day, Westoplex Garage LLC. And he was a subcontractor for another company, which is common in our industry, to have 1099 guys work for you. So, he let me ride in his truck with him for two months so I could learn the different parts, the different situations, the different brakes, doors, everything I could know in 60 days. I rode with him every day while he was working for this other company. And then, the moment came, October 1st, where we had said we were going to do this together and go out, go after it. So, we went to the largest distributor here in DFW, and we bought $5,000 worth of parts and put them all in the truck. And then October 1st, I put it out on Instagram that this is what we’re doing. We’ve got an honest garage door company. Nobody likes their garage door company. They all feel like you’re getting ripped off every time you have to call them. Call us. And I’ll be damned if we didn’t sell all $5,000 of those parts in 60 days. And in two months, we had enough money to pay ourselves each $5,000 in profit, after 60 days. And we ran this thing, just him and I, for seven or eight months before we moved out of my garage at my house that he fixed into the building we’re now in. And now, we’ve got six guys that are running constantly. They’re running right now. We’ve got an epoxy floor division, a gate division, a commercial door and a residential door division. So, it was one of those things where I saw an opportunity within Fort Worth, Texas, that was getting bullied by the big guys for so many years that they had a monopoly, and they could charge whatever they wanted because they knew it had to be fixed and it was an emergency for most people. And I just thought it was wrong. So, our entire marketing play was the honest garage door company, and we still carry that to this day, and we give people honest prices and we’re there on time, we’re polite, we’re respectful, and we usually can turn them around faster than anyone else. 

Alex Bridgeman: Just the being on time, that puts you in the top quartile of service providers, like that just by itself. 

John Peterson: It does. And it’s one of those businesses that I love the service industry. I love it because you’re in front of customers. You get to know them by name. You have repeat business. They’re always going to call you if you do a good job the first time. And AI can’t replace it. It’s just one of those things that you’re not going to get a robot in there to replace a garage door. It will never happen. And it’s going to be around forever. People have to have that door working. They have to have that gate working. They got to go to school. They got to pick their kids up. They have an emergency, that thing’s got to work. And then we have the luxury division, which we call the epoxy floor division is the luxury. It’s not a necessity. If you want to pay for it, we’ve got it. But you’re right. It’s something that AI can’t replace, and that’s one of the reasons I really like it. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, what are the benefits of an epoxy floor versus concrete? What’s the marketing brochure like for a service like that? 

John Peterson: It turns a garage into a room, more or less. You look at a regular concrete floor, it’s got oil stains, cracks. It looks horrible. You wouldn’t want to spend time in there. You just park in there and you go inside. Well, when you get an epoxy floor done on your garage floor, it’s beautiful. It goes from looking like the worst floor on your square footage to one of the best in your house. And so as far as durability goes, you’ve got 10 mils of surface there that has a clear coat on top where you’re not leaving tire marks on it. If oil spills on it, your car’s leaking, you just wipe it up with a paper towel and you’re done. If oil spills on bare concrete, it’s going to seep into the concrete because concrete’s porous and you’re going to have a massive ugly stain. So, we call it a luxury, and it is, but we do get a lot of customers doing it in commercial buildings just for aesthetics and for ease of cleanup. We did a kitchen for Meals on Wheels. I’m sure you all have Meals on Wheels up there. But we did a Meals on Wheels where they basically donate food to homeless people and people that can’t afford to eat. And we turned their pretty ugly floor into a showroom floor where if they spill a meal on it, it’s not going to seep into the concrete and look terrible for people to come in there and check out their space. So, durability is probably second or third on the list, but most people do it for aesthetics. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are the latest and greatest gadgets that you like about garages right now, anything with connectivity or lighting or like what are you excited when someone’s like excited to install in their garage that most people don’t ask for but it’s kind of a nifty extra?

John Peterson: Yeah, there’s a lot. You can go on your phone and open and close your garage door from anywhere in the world. It connects to your home’s Wi-Fi. You’ve always- you’ve got a screen on there via the MyQ app with LiftMaster that it’ll tell you who opened the door. It’ll tell you how long it’s been opened, if it’s open or closed. So, if you leave town, you’re going on vacation, and you’re not sure if you shut the garage door, and usually garages are facing the street where people can drive by, see if it’s open, that’s a problem. That worries people. Someone could just roll in there and take your lawnmower or whatever’s in there. And you never know. So these new openers that we install, we are a LiftMaster dealer. We deal exclusively with LiftMaster. We don’t mess with any other cheap product. They’ve got built-in cameras that come down off the unit and look out the garage for one. And then for two, they’re connected to your home’s Wi-Fi. So, like I said earlier, you can see if the door’s open, closed, you can shut it, open it. If you’ve got someone coming over, a dog sitter or whatever, someone needs to drop a package off, and you’re in Minnesota, your house is in Texas, you can open it from Minnesota. You can see that it’s opening, and then you can see the person walk in there and drop the package off. When they leave, you can close it. It’s come a long way. And the access systems that we have now where you can monitor who’s in, who’s out, who has access, who doesn’t, what codes you want to use, it’s just light years better than what we’re used to when we were growing up where you just press the button, it opens, you press the button, and it’s closed. It’s a lot more streamlined. It’s a lot more high tech. There’s just a ton of stuff you can do with a door now that you couldn’t do 10, 15 years ago. 

Alex Bridgeman: And Dallas, I imagine, has been a pretty great market to be in for any home service for quite a while. Do you kind of track what’s driving new customers into your business, whether it’s a portion is new construction, a portion is aging home infrastructure? Like what does the Dallas Fort Worth market feel like to you the last few years? 

John Peterson: I may get this wrong and you’re going to have to double check my facts here, but as far as DFW is concerned nationwide, I believe we have the second or third most people moving here every year. I mean, it’s a massive influx of people from all over the country every year. And with that comes new homes, new apartments. Apartment complexes are going up all over the place and existing apartment complexes have to comply by code, and a lot of their code is garage doors. So, we’ve been able to secure some apartment complexes that have 80 doors, 80 or 90 doors and we maintain them. And then you think about self-storage units. With more people comes more stuff, and more stuff equals more storage for stuff, and people are hoarders by nature now. And self storage units are a massive part of our business. We service over 300 units. And those doors break all the time, and they don’t- they’re not fixable. They have a spring that’s inside of the barrel door. We’re talking about roll up doors here. The springs are internal, and for the owner of the self storage unit, it is more cost-effective and time-effective, they can rent that unit out faster if they just replace the door. And that door that costs us $400 or $500, well, we charge $1,100 to put it in, and it’s done in one day. Well, guess what, that owner of that storage unit facility can just charge- can just rent it the next day and they make their money back in two or three months, as opposed to getting a spring and fixing it and ordering parts and then it’s out two or three months. So self-storage is a big deal for us because usually they have an automatic gate at the front where it’s a key card or a pin pad or something where we do the gate, we do the doors, we do apartment complexes. And you think about the amount of doors, garage doors and gates just in Fort Worth alone. I mean, there’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions. There’s a ton. And there has never been a better time to be in the service business in this area ever, I think. I mean, we’ve got 50 competitors. There’s 50 companies just like us, and we’re all in business. And we’re on the smaller side. I would say, as far as the 50 goes, we’re probably ninth, tenth, something like that. I can think of a few off the top of my head that are certainly bigger than us. But there’s enough business to go around for everybody. And there’s constant change happening within our industry. As far as marketing goes, a lot of our competitors are antiquated in their approach to marketing, which we’ve tried to do strictly internet things. I mean, our industry is, usually the owners of these companies, they’ve been around, and their family passed it down to them and they’re the third generation owner. They just send out magazine mailers or ValPak coupons in the mail where a 35-year-old guy that has two kids that grew up on Facebook and online, he’s not going to look at that ValPak ad. He’s just not. Well, guess what, that’s your prime earner. That’s the guy you want to be in front of. You send out mailers and ValPak ads and paper stuff, yeah, you might get the 75-year-old lady that lives alone, but she’s going to put it on her fridge until she needs to use it. Everybody our age is going to throw that away. They don’t want to see that. So, we’ve tried to do internet stuff, internet marketing, stay in front of customers on a weekly basis on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, on platforms that people use every day that are proven methods of advertising, and they’re free. We’ve spent a lot of money on those paper ads and doing those sorts of things, but our ROI is not there. We ask people when they call us, how’d you hear about us? And almost every time, it’s Google, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. We’ve actually stopped doing paper ads because the money’s just not there. It’s not in it. So, for the future, we do focus most of our marketing efforts online and that is not common in our industry. 

Alex Bridgeman: It seems like a lot of that business model functions as you have an install base of doors that you’ve worked on at some point. You kind of leave your name and phone number by the clicker. And so now, the more, the longer you’re in business and the more doors you work on, the bigger your install base is, the more maintenance you get off of that base. What helps you…? So, beyond the marketing piece, what helps you get that, keep that top of funnel of new installs pretty large and productive? 

John Peterson: That’s what we try to figure out every month – how do we gain new customers? How do we expand from our thousand or so that we have to get to 2000? How do we get to 4,000? And I think, especially here in Fort Worth, as long as you stay relevant within the online community and you don’t miss a beat on the internet or on all of your platforms, you’re able to gain new customers. I’ve thought about radio ads. Radio ads are pretty cost effective here. And a lot of people in Fort Worth are stuck on one radio station. They have been their whole life. Because usually when you’re born here, you’re raised here, you stay here, at least me, my wife, all of our families, we always- I went to LSU, but I came back. So, the cost to customer, our cost to customer, which basically is what we pay to get in front of that customer in marketing dollars, it’s about $120 is what it costs us as a company to get our technicians in front of that customer. And so as long as our technicians are doing the right thing and selling the right product to the customer, their ticket is going to be probably double that on minimum. Our average ticket’s about $300 on the service side, not the door side. So, if we spend our marketing dollars effectively to gain new customers, we’re able to turn that $120 it costs us to get that guy there into a double or a triple on our money. And we’ve certainly had instances where we were mentioning before we started recording of technicians going into customers’ houses, leaving estimates, and then turning around, selling our parts that we pay for on his truck for cash on the side. And that kind of stuff happens in our industry. Unfortunately, you can’t hire MIT grads in this industry to go work on garage doors. So you do see theft. You do see guys that have maybe their own LLCs outside of our company that we hire as contractors, and they tell the customer when they’re in front of them, oh yeah, well, here’s the estimate from Westoplex, but I can do this on the side for you for cash for half of it. Well, then they use our parts, and they pay the guy cash. And then we can’t warranty the job because we didn’t do it. And he did it outside of the company. We have to fire that guy. We have to file a claim. We have to do all this stuff. So, there are a lot of instances, especially in the last couple of months, that we’ve had- we had one technician we had to let go because he was doing this kind of stuff. And unfortunately, it’s kind of the nature of our business. But there are companies that will leave that guy on, even though they know that kind of stuff’s happening because it is very hard to find people that are qualified to work on these jobs that are trustworthy. And we still haven’t replaced that guy. He’s been gone six weeks. And we’ve had to double time our other technicians and pull them off of jobs to take care of everybody. So, we’re working 12 hour days right now because we’re a little short-handed. 

Alex Bridgeman: How hard is it, how hard is the training process for if you took a high school grad who’s never touched a spring before to work on garage doors, what’s that training process like? 

John Peterson: It’s pretty quick. These kids, we are going to build out a regular eight by seven single car garage door framed out with wood, just like you’d see in anyone’s house, and we have it in the shop where we can bring somebody in, we can break the door five ways on purpose and show them how to fix each one of those five ways, show them the parts they need, show them how to turn the springs. My director of operations, he spent 15 years running one of our biggest competitors here in Fort Worth, their company. And it took me a lot of convincing and a lot of sales to get this guy to come over here, but he is the best in the business around here. So, he will train a new hire with zero experience, take him out in the field with him. In two or three weeks, he’s ready to go. 

Alex Bridgeman: Wow, that’s pretty quick. What are the most productive recruiting grounds for that kind of talent? 

John Peterson: So, we generally don’t like guys with garage door experience as our technicians. I say that now, I would not say that a year ago, but now I’ve learned that people that can sell, waiters are great prospects, people that have served people that can talk to people, that are personable. Waiters are great prospects to be a garage door technician because of their interpersonal skills. When you’re in front of a customer and their garage door, there’s always something to fix. There’s always something broken. There is. I mean, it may be running, but you can always make it better. You can always bring it up to speed. And a lot of technicians with experience will miss a sales opportunity because they fix the bare minimum. And that not only hurts their paycheck, that hurts the company’s paycheck too. So, waiters are great because they can sit there and well, yeah, your door’s functioning fine, but it’s loud. Do you have kids that sleep above the garage? And they can look at the house and tell there’s a bedroom up there. Well, when you’re coming home at 10 PM somewhere and you open the door, is it waking up your kids? Well, we can sell you rollers and a tune-up kit to help that not happen. When a guy with experience will go in there, and he won’t care about that $200 tune-up. He’ll just fix the opener that’s disconnected for 60 bucks and he’ll leave. So, when you get a guy that’s proficient with people and proficient at sales and they move to this industry, they’re able to talk a customer through in a really specific way of why they need what we’re trying to sell them, why it makes their life better. And so, they’re more enthusiastic. They’re excited about sales. And we’ve had guys, we’ve had guys here that have made $3,000 in a week to them, like that’s their paycheck for the week, because of their ability to get in front of a customer and not sell them stuff they don’t need, but sell them stuff that they do need or they might want just because they explained it and were personable with the customer. And I think the guys that have… even ladies that have come from restaurant backgrounds or hospitality backgrounds are much easier to train in the garage door industry because it is a sales position at the end of the day. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, then what two or three things do you look for if you’re looking to hire someone? Or maybe you’re at a restaurant and the waiter is great and for these two or three reasons, like what stands out to you? The sales piece and personality and personable, certainly I can see that. 

John Peterson: You’ll find out real quick if someone’s honest, especially in this industry. You cut them loose after two or three weeks of learning, and then they get in front of a customer. And the customer calls the company, they call Chad or they call me, and they say, your technician was out here trying to sell me a $700 package when I had another quote for 250 for the same thing. And that happens fast. You’ll know immediately if one of your new guys is honest. But when you’re looking at a guy that’s sitting in front of you in the interview room here in the office, and there’s really no way to tell if he’s honest right there. They can tell you anything. And people will lie. They just will. You have to get them in front of a real-world scenario to figure out, okay, can I trust this guy? Can I not? And that’s something you don’t know in the interview. It’s like anything. You hire a guy and you hope for the best. You say, go get them, dude, cut them loose, get in the truck and have at it. And you find out quickly. But we do hire people based on their personal skills. We would like them to have graduated from high school. It’s not a requirement. One of our guys, one of our best guys actually, never graduated from high school. He’s been with us two years. He’s our head door installer and he- I wish I had ten like him. But he’s very honest. He shows up to work happy. He doesn’t sell anything that a customer doesn’t need or want. He just never had a complaint with him. He’s always getting five-star reviews, and Google reviews are the driver of our company. And he’s mentioned by name in these reviews. So we know when Eddie goes out to a job that Eddie is going to do a good job. We just do. And it’s hard to find guys like Eddie. So that’s probably what I would leave that at. There’s no real tried and true method to make sure that these guys are going to tell the truth. Because like I said earlier, you’re hiring guys that really need it, that aren’t educated to the point of getting a higher paid job somewhere else. They have to have their own truck. They have to have their own tools. They have to have a few things that we require. If they don’t have them, we’ll buy them for them, and then we’ll take it out of their check as they go on a loan. But you really don’t need a ton. I mean, you don’t need experience in this industry to do well. Like I said, you just have to be willing to bust your ass and go out there and sell the things people need and be respectful. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are the reasons that someone leaves, either leaves the industry or leaves your company for another? What are the exit rationales? 

John Peterson: They drive a lot of miles. These guys, if they’ve got a full day of service on the fixing garage door side, that’s what we call our service side, say they’ve got four jobs. Well, Fort Worth and Dallas are 45 minutes apart. Most people think they’re right next to each other, but they’re really not. And there’s a lot of traffic between Fort Worth and Dallas every day. It doesn’t matter what time of day. And it can be brutal on guys to go from here at the office in Fort worth, they go to Dallas. They might go to Prosper, which is another 20 minutes North of Dallas. And then they’ve got a job in Burleson, which is an hour and 20 minutes south of there, and then they come back to the office. These guys can do 300 miles in a day. And we try to organize their schedules to where they’re close or we have calls that come in and there’s three of them within 10 minutes. Well, we’ll send that guy to all three. But there are days where we have five jobs for one guy, and they’re not within 30 minutes of each other. So, they’re spending a lot of time in their trucks, filling up their gas tanks that they pay for because our service techs are 1099s for us. So they’re doing a lot of miles. They’re putting a lot of strain on their truck. They’re racking up all these miles and time. And I think when people quit or leave this industry, it’s not financial because these guys do, they do well. And we pay our guys more than anyone around here does. And our guys work on 25% of commission of the subtotal minus parts, which is 5% more than anyone else pays around. So it’s never a financial issue. It’s usually, hey, I’m gone 10, 11 hours a day. I don’t want to drive that much anymore. I’m going to go get a job in a different industry. They generally never leave Westoplex Garage because of money. They won’t go to another garage door company. They will leave the industry and get something that’s more nine to five, where they have a salary. Maybe they’re a salesman for one of our distributors. We’ve had that happen where a guy just got sick of driving. He wanted a desk sales job, and he was happy to go make $50,000 a year answering phones and have a set schedule. It’s not because they were going to make more money. It’s because of their time. And that’s understandable. At the end of the day, all you control is your time. So, we get it. 

Alex Bridgeman: How have others solved the driving around and just distance problem? 

John Peterson: So, a couple of our competitors have multiple offices. So they’ve got a Fort Worth office. They’ve got a Dallas office. They’ve got a Cleburne office. And they’ve strategically placed these offices closer to where their technicians want to work. And that is something we are in the process of doing. We haven’t yet. We are one office. We do service a massive area. So, you will get paid well here, but at the same time, you might be gone all day. But our competitors that have done it right have had the resources, the experience, and the time to put together satellite offices for these guys where they can, say you’ve got a technician that’s in Dallas, we’re in Fort Worth. Well, yeah, we’re a Fort Worth based company, but our office in Dallas hires a guy from Dallas. And then all of a sudden, every job that they have is within 20 minutes of the office, which is where they get their parts, which is where they report to in the morning, they get their snacks for the day, whatever it is. And they don’t have to come all the way back to Fort Worth to, say they need a part when they’re in Dallas, they don’t have to come all the way back to Fort Worth to get it. They can go 15 minutes to Dallas. I think that’s how a couple of the bigger companies in our area have figured it out. And we are within a year of opening, we’re actually within a month of opening another one, but it’s out of state. It’s in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

Alex Bridgeman: Why Baton Rouge? Just cause you’re from there? 

John Peterson: Why not? It’s one of those things. I love Baton Rouge. I get excited to go to Baton Rouge. All four of my kids love LSU. I love LSU. I want to go to all the football games. And I haven’t been back. I go back a couple of times a year, but I don’t have a business reason to go to Baton Rouge. And so, we’ve got, me and a friend of mine, who has got extensive experience in the service industry, are opening a company in Baton Rouge, a garage door company, pretty soon here in the next month. And we were talking about aviation earlier, obviously your background’s deep in aviation, and being a private pilot, now I can use my airplane as a business expense, write off my trips to Baton Rouge for the other branch of our company there. And that is a cheat code that not many people know about. That is an extremely convenient deal. My partner can call me in Baton Rouge, and I’m eating breakfast at the house about to go to the office here. He’s like, hey, I need you here. I need you here by lunch. I’m like, all right, well, I can’t even get there commercially flying by lunch, but guess what, I can go hop in the airplane and be there in two hours. I’m there at 11. So that opens up a whole new world and that’s probably not a topic that you want to cover today, but the whole flying for work thing is going to be a blast for me because 90% of aviation people do it for the fun, the fun of flying. And when you get to write it off as a business expense, it’s just a bonus. 

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely. Plus, you also have close to a dozen airports just in the Dallas Fort Worth area, so you can land it pretty close to home versus somewhere like Charlotte or Durham, where I am now, where you’ve really got one option and it’s the busiest one that there is. 

John Peterson: Yeah. I keep my airplane at a very small airport here in Weatherford. It’s 15 minutes from my house, but it’s a 40 foot runway by 2,500 feet. And there’s a flight school there. There’s probably another 80 airplanes there. But it’s an uncontrolled, untowered airport where, in aviation, that basically means it’s a free for all, and it can be extremely dangerous or it can be great. It depends on who’s in the air. So, I keep it there. I love keeping it there. I can hop in, get gas, and roll out of there in 20 minutes, and I’m on my way. So I don’t have to deal with FBOs. I don’t have to deal with expensive fuel prices. I don’t have to deal with the tower. And it makes life a lot easier. And it’s cheaper. Our hangar fee’s $400 a month, which you’re not going to find that in Charlotte. 

Alex Bridgeman: No, no, you will not. That’s a phenomenal price. Even finding a hanger to begin with in some markets is quite an accomplishment regardless of what it actually costs. 

John Peterson: They are hard to come by. Yeah. 

Alex Bridgeman: Are you going to get one in Baton Rouge too? 

John Peterson: I don’t know, Alex. That kind of depends on a lot of things. So Westoplex here, I mentioned we had 50 competitors. Baton Rouge, there’s three. You’re talking half a million people, three garage door companies. That is ripe for success down there. And when you have, as you know, in business, the smaller monopoly that’s running the area, they can kind of conglomerate and do whatever they want. And when we open this place in Baton Rouge and people start hearing about the prices and the turnaround and who’s running it, who’s doing the work, it’s going to, I think, in my opinion, it’s going to boom. It might be better than here, where we have all these competitors to deal with. There, it’s very small. And I know based on the data that we’ve accumulated over the last six months in Baton Rouge, they are three weeks out. They are three, four weeks out on service, which is usually an emergency for most people. So, if we can turn that around in two or three days, 24 hours, we’re going to get everybody. And that’s what I’m most excited about down there. One, flying there, obviously, is going to be awesome, but two, the lack of competitors down there will help us almost immediately. 

Alex Bridgeman: What have been some growing pains as the business has grown or changed technicians or this new location? Like, what have been your pain points as you go along? 

John Peterson: Personnel. Personnel. It’s the hardest part. It will be the hardest part forever. And when we started this thing, starting a company, I was so naive when we built the company originally, how hard it would be. I didn’t know that starting a company would be this hard. I mean, you don’t know who your distributors are. You don’t have relationships with anybody. You have to pay a premium for everything because you’re not established. You don’t have a building. You don’t have technicians. You barely have a truck. You don’t have insurance. Like all of these things I didn’t even think about it. We were like, yeah, let’s do this. No, let’s just do it. It’ll be easy. No, it’s not. So hindsight, looking back two and a half years ago, I would have bought a company, would have bought a building, would have bought an existing company, rebranded it. That’s easy. That’s a lot easier than starting from zero. But I didn’t know that. I was very naive. I just thought, yeah, we’re going to, gung ho, just jump into this thing head first. And it was hard to figure out those things originally. It took us the better part of a year before we established relationships with distributors and got our prices on what we buy low enough to where we could actually make money, because you call, we are a dealer for Amarr and LiftMaster. If you call Amarr, and you’re just Joe blow off the street, you want to buy a door, well, if you don’t have an LLC or a company, you can’t even buy a door, for one. Then you form your company, and then you try to buy a door. Well, you’re going to pay more than anyone else because you don’t have a relationship with them. They don’t know you. You haven’t spent any money with them, so they don’t know the volume you’re going to do. You can tell them the volume you’re going to do, and they laugh at you. They don’t care. They want results. They want years of purchasing power. And it took us, before we finally became a dealer with Amarr, it took us a year of purchasing from them before they’d even really treat us seriously. And that’s so hard. That’s why I say the startup thing is much harder than buying an existing company that I didn’t know about two and a half years ago. So, I don’t even remember your original question. I just went off on a tangent there. Sorry. But the startup versus buying existing I would have done differently if I had- I wasn’t so naive. 

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely. Well, as a closing thought, is there something you’re most excited about in the next year or two? Baton Rouge obviously is probably going to make the list. 

John Peterson: I’d say Baton Rouge just because it’s the most current thing. It’s what’s next on the horizon for us. But here within Fort Worth, I’m really looking forward to the next six months because we’re right at that stage where we’ve made a big hire. We hired a director of operations in May, and it was a big risk for us as a company. When you bring on a guy, and I’ve got really good friends here in Fort Worth that I consulted with beforehand, Chris Powers being one of them, who you know. And I talked to Chris, I said, Chris, look, man, I can’t do this alone anymore. There’s too much work. There’s too many things for me to do for 10, 11 hours a day. I’ve got to hire somebody. But the guy that I want to hire is so expensive that I’m not sure the company can afford him. Well, he came back with, every person that I’ve hired that I thought was expensive turned out to look cheap after a year. I was like, I thought about that. I was like, okay, what does he mean by that? Like, well, he must mean that they paid for themselves and then some to the company. So, I asked him, I said, well, did they prove their worth? He said, every one of them. So, we hired the guy. And he’s on an, I’ll tell you, he’s on an $8,400 a month salary plus a massive commission structure. And this guy never went to college. So, he went from running the Dallas Fort Worth second biggest garage door company over to a startup that’s two years old, and everybody thought he was crazy. I thought, I think I’m crazy for hiring him. Like, we don’t know if we can afford him yet. Well, in the first two months, he’s brought on seven roofing companies, two apartment complexes, two or three storage units, and he’s out right now prospecting as I’m sitting here talking to you. So he’s paid for himself two or three times over in the first two months. As long as me as an owner, as long as I keep putting the company in good positions and I’m getting good counsel from people like Chris Powers, from people that are other mentors that I have, I think we’ll be fine. But that’s what I’m most excited about in the next six months is watching my director of operations, Chad, thrive in his new environment. 

Alex Bridgeman: I love it. That’s awesome. It’s always good to find those hires that that work out or are home runs for a whole bunch of different… especially ones you didn’t really foresee coming, that’s always exciting to see. But John, thank you for sharing your time on the podcast and always good to meet another John Peterson. I’ve had good luck so far, so I’m two for two now.

John Peterson: Yeah, you bet, dude. I’ll come on anytime.