Trevor Nix on Growing Multi-Gen Family Garage Business in Portland – EP.283

(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:02:09) – How the family got into garage doors

(00:03:37) – Starting the business and year one struggles

(00:06:09) – Dad joins and business phases begin

(00:08:09) – Business name changes and phone book to digital

(00:10:30) – Rebranding with Kickcharge Creative

(00:12:00) – Modernizing technology and multi-gen advantages

(00:14:03) – Big decisions and working with family

(00:19:21) – Implementing new systems and efficiency focus

(00:23:28) – Training techs and customer interactions

(00:46:01) – Tech compensation and incentive structure

(00:56:51) – Why Portland’s market supports many garage door companies

(01:04:12) – Building company culture and employee events

Alex Bridgeman: Welcome to the Think Like an Owner podcast. This is Alex Bridgeman and Rob Southern now joining the show. This podcast is all about building small businesses, and we’ve been focusing a lot on garage doors for our new business that we’re co-owners of, Durable Trades. Meant to own garage door businesses for a long time.

Alex Bridgeman: We like to learn from owners in the industry who’ve been in it for decades and sometimes literally, in your case, Trevor, grew up in it. So we’re excited to chat. We’re here in Portland, and thanks for hosting us, by the way.

Trevor Nix: Yeah, you bet. Absolutely. I’m excited. This is my first podcast, so.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we’re, we’re excited to have you.

Alex Bridgeman: I think we met because my family’s garage door broke over Christmas, and- Right … you seem to run one of the better shops in town, so I was like, “You gotta call these guys.” And, you know, come to find out you got Golden Retrievers everywhere as part of the brand, so love that too. We do. Yeah. We have two Corgis.

Trevor Nix: Um- Excellent. We have got three or four generations of Golden Retrievers within the family.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. That’s most excellent. Well, Rob, do you wanna tell us how you got into this? And then we can jump into Trevor, how you got into the business, and kinda go from there. Your– this is your first podcast as a guest, or not as a guest, as a co-host.

Rob Southern: Yeah. As a, as a host. Yeah. So you approached me about being a guest with my executive coach, and that was fun. And yeah. I mean, Alex and I have known each other for several years through a kind of investor community that we’re a part of. And I sold my business last June, so almost a year and a month ago to the day.

Rob Southern: And when we re-reconnected at the end of last year, he had sort of stumbled into this idea of buying and owning garage door businesses. And I, I thought, “Well, that sounds pretty interesting, and I’m gonna re– live the rest of my life in the Pacific Northwest. I wanna be in business with a partner, with all the same investors, and do something, you know, interacts with the physical world, and that lasts.”

Rob Southern: And so I was just excited to, yeah, get into business with Alex and also just learn from other business owners, so.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Excellent. And to that, Trevor, thanks for coming on the podcast to share about it. So how did you and your family get into garage doors?

Trevor Nix: Oh, boy. Story goes something like Grandpa was just looking for a job when he moved down here.

Trevor Nix: He used to work for Boeing up in C-the Seattle area, and they moved down here, and he found a job working for a large company in town called Crawford Door. They were kinda one of the, one of the only shows in town. And he was the West Side service guy for Crawford Door. So that’s kinda how the, the garage door industry was born into our family.

Rob Southern: Is Crawford still around?

Trevor Nix: That Crawford, no, not technically. There is a Crawford door that was then kind of bought or absorbed in some fashion by a company now called Interior Tech. I’ve had some friends work there in and out over the years. And they do, they do all commercial stuff as well, so. But Crawford as we used to know it, no, they’re, they’re no longer.

Alex Bridgeman: And at some point he started his own shop. When did that happen?

Trevor Nix: Yeah, so that’s kind of an interesting story. Something happened, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but his, one of his best friends convinced him that he needed to buy a gas station- Of course … as a business venture to buy a gas station.

Trevor Nix: And so he left Crawford Door and did that. Owned the gas station for a handful of years, then decided to end up getting out of that and sold that business. They were actually part of a class action lawsuit against, oh boy, Shell or one of the big, one of the big dogs. And they, once he, they won some money in the lawsuit, and he took the whole family to Hawaii, and then when he came back he had some money and said, “I’m gonna start a garage door business.”

Trevor Nix: And that was basically how it happened.

Alex Bridgeman: So went to garage doors to gas stations, back to garage doors? Correct.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm.

Alex Bridgeman: And so, like, what was the first year opening up his own shingle like?

Trevor Nix: It’s actually funny you say that. Grandpa’s name was on the, on the business license, and it’s always been, you know, Tech started the business, and, uh, we’ve always told the story my grandpa started the business.

Trevor Nix: But the reality is my grandparents started the business. My grandpa was the owner, and he was the one that decided to take the leap and do it, but Grandma was always there in the background, was always answering phones, and scheduling, and running the office side of things, doing the books. Grandpa was out in the field doing the selling and the service and everything else.

Trevor Nix: And after the first year, we really attribute our entire success to my grandma because after the first year, Grandpa… The story goes that Grandpa came back to Grandma and said, “Hey, I, I think we should just hang it up, and, you know, I’ll go back to work for Crawford Door, and, and this really isn’t working.”

Trevor Nix: And Grandma said, “Let’s give it one more year. Let’s just give it one more year, see how it goes.” And 38 years later, here we are.

Alex Bridgeman: What happened in that one year?

Trevor Nix: It was rough. It was just rough. Getting the phone to ring, trying to figure out how to make money. That was the big thing, was getting the phone to ring and actually getting your name out there and establishing yourself.

Trevor Nix: And it’s scary as an owner, you know? I mean, it’s scary as an owner of an established business, let alone an owner that doesn’t really have any money and doesn’t have a name for himself yet, and you’re, you’re out there trying and trying to drum everything up you can. But, you know, it’s an investment and it’s a long game, and it’s hard to, to gut it out and suck it up sometimes.

Rob Southern: What changed when you started doing that worked?

Trevor Nix: You know, I don’t know the answer to that. I think, I think it was just a combination of the confidence that, well, we’re just gonna give it one more year anyway and see what happens, and I, I’m sure the referrals started to roll in. And I think the business knowledge of after the first year learning the things that didn’t work, we’re able to change pretty quickly and start to establish, you know, procedures and things that did work in a more common way.

Trevor Nix: And yeah, I, I would say a lot of it is just the confidence. You know, the fact that Grandma said we’re gonna do it one more year and we’re gonna make it happen. And, you know, at some point it’s bound to work, isn’t it?

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I, I wonder if there’s like a, you know, work expands to fill the time allowed, and if you just give yourself a year to figure it out- Right

Alex Bridgeman: you kind of like, your, your mind just jumps to different ways to make it work.

Trevor Nix: That’s what I was gonna say, was mindset. I, I would imagine, I mean, again, that was far before I was born, but I would imagine a whole lot of it was mindset. It was a matter of, “Nope, we’re gonna make this work.”

Rob Southern: There’s a famous football coach.

Rob Southern: His quote was, “We never lost a game. We just ran out of time.” So, you know- I love that … if you stay in it long enough, you know, you’re bound to find, find success Do you know at what point, you know, he hired his first employee or it really started to, you know, become something other than his job?

Trevor Nix: Yeah. So actually my dad was technically the first employee.

Trevor Nix: Well, okay, I guess my grandma would’ve been maybe. I’m not sure exactly what the logistics of that were. But my dad was the first employee and there was, there was the original plan when the business was started. My dad was out of college and working at that point. In fact, my dad actually worked for Crawford Door with my grandpa for a very short time until they found out that there was a ne- nepotism there and they had a no nepotism policy and fired my dad.

Trevor Nix: So my dad had already kinda been in the garage door game and was working for another company across town, and the plan was eventually that once they got on their feet, he would come into the business as well and kinda help them, you know, run it and grow it and be part of it. So it was always kinda the plan was there for the succession plan between my grandpa and my dad, and I believe my dad came into the business after he’d had about five years of experience in the industry and was really well established in the industry and in the market.

Trevor Nix: He was an installer, and so he quickly became the installer. My grandpa never really sold doors or installed doors. He was a service guy. He didn’t really like installing doors. Didn’t really have any experience. In fact, you could I, I… In fact, I actually asked him not too long ago, “How many doors do you think you’ve installed in your life?”

Trevor Nix: And he kinda pulled it out of his fingers and started counting. So didn’t really install many doors. He serviced, which worked out really well when my dad came in because my dad was an installer. And so they then quickly had a install side and a service side, and each of them handled their own respective side, and it worked really well.

Alex Bridgeman: Do you remember any from the way your dad and grandpa has described building the business, does it sound like there were any distinct phases of life for the business over time? Like, there was a period where things were challenging but then something changed and there, it there felt like a different phase of life for the business.

Alex Bridgeman: Like, kinda like the childhood, teenage years, you know, that sort of thing. Sure.

Trevor Nix: You know, that’s actually, that’s an interesting question because our business has now renamed itself and rebranded three times. Well, okay, twice. Two, two times of rebrand but had three names. We originally started as Tiger Door I would say if t- then we became All About Doors, and then we became All About Garage Doors just about, you know, 18, 19 months ago.

Trevor Nix: It’s kinda interesting too because each, each generation, me being the third generation, has now as we started taking over has changed the name to the, the new best thing for whatever the case may be. For instance, uh, this might be one of the answers to your question, is in 2004 my dad became the sole owner, took over the business from my grandfather, and we changed the name from Tiger Door to All About Doors.

Trevor Nix: And at the time it was all phone book advertising. So we, we didn’t wanna be limited to Tiger and have people have to look up Tiger to find us. Yeah. Flip pages, exactly. We didn’t wanna be low in, on the alphabet, so we thought, okay, what can we start with an A? We don’t have anybody with an A in our, a name in our family.

Trevor Nix: So I remember sitting down as a kid with my family, my, my mom and my sister and my dad, and trying to come up with names and, and ideas. Well, we landed on All About Doors Well, fast-forward 20 years to 2024, and the number of phone calls that we were getting for people that were looking for doors that we didn’t work on, because we’re a garage door company- Like entryway doors

Alex Bridgeman: kind of

Trevor Nix: thing?

Trevor Nix: entry doors. I mean, I would get phone calls from, from contractors saying, “Hey, I need a bid for 600 doors.” And I’d go, “Whoa. Absolutely. What do you need?” And he’d go, “Oh, I need a bunch of 3068s for whatever else,” blah, blah, blah. And I’d say, “Oh, man. Are, are you talking man doors?” And he’d say, “Yeah.” And I’d say, “Does this happen to be a hotel?”

Trevor Nix: You know, “Yeah, got a new hotel going in Portland.” And that happened constantly, and it started just burning at my soul knowing how much money we just wasted on that lead paying Google for a call for a service that we don’t offer.

Rob Southern: Were you tempted to sell him some man doors?

Trevor Nix: We actually have sold some man doors.

Trevor Nix: Yeah, we’ve kinda dabbled in it a little bit, and it’s … My dad did it for a while to try and offer it as a service for that reason. It’s just a whole nother set of training. It’s a whole nother set of tools. It’s a whole nother set of suppliers. It’s, it’s a, it’s its own department. There’s a lot to it. Yeah.

Trevor Nix: So we’ve kind of played with it over the years, and I still contemplate it every once in a while because we still get questions about it. But, you know, kind of the next answer to your question, I, I guess would be, you know, in 2024, knowing how much money we were wasting in marketing, I hopped on the phone with our good buddy Dan Antonelli over there at Kickcharge Creative.

Trevor Nix: And I remember we had a good 45-minute conversation and, you know, one of the first things he asked me was, “Well, what’s the name of your business?” And I said, “Well, it’s called All About Doors.” And he hesitated, and the first thing he said was, “You get a lot of calls about front doors?” And I just started laughing, and I said, “Dan, that’s why I’m calling you.”

Trevor Nix: That’s

Alex Bridgeman: why I’m here. Yep.

Trevor Nix: So that’s kind of another, you know, if you’re talking phase of, phase of life or phase of environment, it would be, it would be the advertising environment. In terms of, like, personal life and phases of personal life, one big thing, my dad actually used to be a Washington County Sheriff deputy.

Trevor Nix: He did that for a little while, three or four years. And he was doing full-time garage doors during the day, and he was the new guy on, you know, on the totem pole and was working the graveyard shift for the sheriff’s department. And my grandpa basically told him that he felt he was becoming cynical, and he didn’t like what it was doing to his, you know, mental state and his family life.

Trevor Nix: And you know, he, we, my sister and I were both young, and he was busy and gone all the time, and my grandpa essentially told him, “You know, if you quit, it’s your turn to have the business,” so to speak. And so my dad thought that was a pretty good plan and took it So I would say that’s kind of another… That was probably one of the biggest turns in our business, because my dad was then able to take it from my grandfather, who was very old-fashioned, old school, did everything pen and paper, you know, in 2003 and ’04 when things were starting to come to technology advancements and the internet.

Trevor Nix: And so my dad, to this day, will talk about how difficult it was to bring the business out of the 1800s, is what he says, to modern day, and getting everything, you know, out of the file cabinet and onto the documents on your computer. And he talks about it just, you know, how many hours and hours and hours of effort it, it took to do so.

Trevor Nix: So I look at myself as very lucky and, and blessed to be able to have the opportunity to take a business that was already up to snuff, so to speak, with technology, and actually kind of leading in technology in our industry in a lot of cases, because my dad truly believed in it and tried to be at the forefront of using tech within a blue collar industry.

Rob Southern: I never really thought about it this way, but I, I think it’s interesting. Multi-generation family-owned businesses almost have this, like, built-in advantage because inevitably someone, you know, a, a younger generation is gonna wanna introduce technology and process and they actually have some credibility with the older generation, right?

Rob Southern: Whereas if you hire someone new into a non-family-owned business, it’s like, “Well, we’ve always done it this way,” and like, “I put this in and they… It’s the right way.” But maybe it’s a little easier to convince people when you’re… It’s all literally all in the family.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. My dad talks about that all the time and how he, he saw the benefits of him coming into the business and the, the new ideas and the new age stuff that he had grown up with compared to what my grandfather had, and explains, or I guess maybe dedicates a lot of our success and growth that we’ve had in the last handful of years for me coming into the business with, again, new ideas and fresh technology and, you know, more understanding of the current technology than he had, and things like that.

Trevor Nix: So that’s… it’s interesting you say that because my dad really attributes a lot of the business growth over the years to that very thing of you gotta have young, fresh ideas and fresh minds in place to keep you in line with the market and where everybody else is.

Rob Southern: Has there been any, you know, controversial, you know, decisions or changes that either worked out or didn’t?

Trevor Nix: Ah, it’s an interesting question.

Alex Bridgeman: There’s gotta be something.

Trevor Nix: There’s always something. You know, it’s, it’s… We’re, we’re family. We are all fighting for the same thing, and everybody tries to get there a different way, and sometimes it causes head butting. A lot of times people will ask me, “How do you work with your dad?”

Trevor Nix: And I, I always jokingly say, “It’s easy. He stays out of my way and I run the business.” Yeah. But I mean, the reality is anytime a big decision comes up, I mean, I am… I’m co-owner with my father, right? And so my title is technically Managing Partner. So any big decision that comes up, I don’t just make it. I always call him and we talk about it, and he 100% of the time ends the conversation with, “It’s your decision,” because I am the managing partner and he trusts me.

Trevor Nix: You know, he gives me the leash that he feels necessary to get us to where we need to be. But there’s always that conversation and my reliance on his past and his experiences to know what might work or what didn’t used to work or what, what the case may be. Can I think of anything specifically? I will tell you that rebranding with KickCharge Creative and the massive undertaking and expense that that was going to hit our business with was I don’t wanna call it a point of contention, but it was definitely a long decision-making process, for sure.

Trevor Nix: I mean, it was majorly expensive. Not just, not just the, the KickCharge portion. I mean, it’s rebranding the trucks, and it’s printing all new everything. It’s redoing your website. It’s all the stationery. It’s everything. You know, and then getting everybody used to it and starting fresh. I mean, down to the, your greeting message on the phone.

Trevor Nix: How do you answer the phone now? That’s different. You know, we’ve done it this way for 20 years. We do it 100 times a day the same way. Well, today you don’t.

Rob Southern: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: That’s hard for your CSRs to swallow. Wish we would’ve done it 20 years ago. You know, there’s a, there’s a thing that people say, I, I think I’ve even heard Dan say it on podcasts before of, “Man, how could you afford to do that?”

Trevor Nix: Well, after you do it, it turns to, “How could you afford not to?”

Rob Southern: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: And, you know, that’s a quote from somebody I’m stealing, but it’s true. It really does hold true. And you know, it was interesting timing for us because we did it towards the end of COVID, where we had some pretty explosive growth through COVID.

Trevor Nix: I mean, our company essentially tripled within three years. And it was interesting timing because it was like, man, we are, we’re going gangbusters, and if we just have a re- truly recognizable brand, we can really lean into that and explode even more. And then the market just took a big dip, you know. And so it’s, uh, it was interesting timing, and I guess nothing’s ever perfect.

Trevor Nix: But even then, regardless, I, I wish we’d have done it sooner and, and I don’t know how we went so long without it.

Rob Southern: That makes me think of this, I don’t know, example of like, you know, similarly investing in employees. I think an employee comes to, you know, CEO and says, “Hey, I wanna take this course,” or, “And will the, will the company pay for it?”

Rob Southern: And he’s like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Then the CFO says, “Well, wait. What if we invest in this person, and then they leave?” And the CEO says, “Well, what if they, we don’t and they stay?”

Trevor Nix: Yep.

Rob Southern: Then the same idea. Yeah.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. I love that quote too. That’s another thing that we’ve really, really leaned into was trying to invest within the company.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm. You know, and, and offer bigger benefits and be more competitive with our offerings to, again, this younger generation that in a lot of cases it’s not all about the money. You know, they wanna be comfortable. They wanna have a stocked refrigerator. They wanna have good benefits. They wanna have the creature comforts that a traditional old style blue collar industry company didn’t have.

Trevor Nix: It was about the money, you know? And so it’s been an interesting process in learning how important investing in your people really is for the success and growth of the business. That’s been another huge, I don’t know, I guess you’d call it business change or life change within the business. Big realization maybe

Rob Southern: I remember when I sold my business, inevitably after the fact, you know, some folks ended up leaving, and they would send messages to kind of our company channel within the larger company chat.

Rob Southern: And the most rewarding part of the whole experience was when people would talk about this being the best job they ever had, right? Because of the people and because of things that we were able to do for them and, and really just, like, the employee experience. It’s

Trevor Nix: amazing. Yeah. Yep, and that’s, that’s big on my radar to continue to push and grow.

Trevor Nix: That’s what I, I really want to continue that track that we’ve been on. You know, I wanna … I always tell my people, like, “I want you all to make more money because that means the business is making more money, and when the business is making more money, we can do cool things.” I tell them all the time, “I wanna do cool things.

Trevor Nix: I wanna have a big building. I wanna have a place people wanna be. I wanna have a cool lunch room with a stocked refrigerator that people like to come back and take their breaks at. I wanna be the place that people don’t mind coming in and hanging out on a Saturday because it’s kinda fun.” You know?

Trevor Nix: That’s, that’s kinda my, my dream lofty goal that I’m pushing towards.

Alex Bridgeman: What are, like, the, the big kinda rocks and goals for this year? Or maybe, like, expanding to, like, the past two years or three years. What have been … The rebrand was big, but-

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm …

Alex Bridgeman: is there something else you’re excited to work on or, or see through?

Trevor Nix: Yeah. It’s interesting you ask that. I, I wouldn’t say … Maybe this is bad of me to say, but I wouldn’t say we have necessarily, like, a big goal. I mean, obviously everybody’s got a revenue goal, but I wouldn’t say there was as much of a big goal, uh, a nearsighted goal. It’s been more this year I’ve been focusing on making things more efficient rather than implementing.

Trevor Nix: The last couple years with the new brand, uh, it’s been a lot of implementation. We’ve brought on some new technology. Uh, we, we use a, a Oh, geez, I’m drawing a blank. It’s a FSM. It’s a field service manager. Workiz, right? It’s called Workiz, yep. Exact CRM, customer relationship manager, whatever you wanna refer to it as.

Trevor Nix: Technically this one, I guess, is an FSM because it’s the field service manager. We can do stuff by dispatching companies or dispatching people. So that’s been a big one with implementing that and implementing all the new technology that they bring within, all the integrations they have within, and getting our…

Trevor Nix: implementing new policies and procedures on how we run jobs, and how we record things, and how we take pictures and what videos and whatever else things we use internally. But it’s been a big outpouring of money. I think maybe one of my lessons I’ve learned within the last few years is, at least the way I picture it, to maybe kinda have a balance of implementation and efficiency and, and finding ways that when you implement things, great, perfect it, and then how can you make it more efficient within?

Trevor Nix: Rather than just implement, implement, implement, implement and expect results back immediately. Because I’ve realized, well, that’s a big outpour of expense, and if you’re implementing all these things and not refining them properly, you’re now spending more money, and it takes a lot longer to try and catch up and get that to be more efficient on the back end.

Trevor Nix: So this, this year was a big focus on making things more efficient and trying to trim the fat, so to speak.

Rob Southern: Does that include kind of, like, adoption of new software or processes or whatever? Absolutely. You’re rolling out, but if it’s only getting used, you know, to 5% of its capabilities or 10% of the time, I, it wasn’t worth it.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. Yeah, we talk about that all the time. You know, we have, for instance, like, one big one that people talk about a lot is credit card processing fees. You know, I know that within Workiz we pay a pretty hefty processing fee. A- and it is painful to look at at the end of every month or especially at the end of every year and realize how much money you paid in processing fees.

Trevor Nix: But I know we could go shop them elsewhere The problem is, or I guess not problem, but the battle is it’s so efficient to be able to use it within the system that you’re using. It’s all under one interface. It just boom, boom, boom. It’s backwards compatible and two-way syncs with QuickBooks. It’s just, it’s instant.

Trevor Nix: Pulls right up. The guys already have it open on their phone. They don’t have to open another application or go to another website. Don’t have to then backwards sync it to Workiz to have it sync to QuickBooks. It’s just immediate. Almost becomes like a customer service benefit and employee retention benefit.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. Employee retention, I’m glad you mentioned that because that is, has been a eye-opening thing for me to see how much of a difference that has made with the employees that we have now, and how they talk about the way that we use our technology or our CRMs and things like that, and how it’s differed from their past experiences, and been better in some ways, or worse in some ways.

Trevor Nix: But the way that it’s, we try to make it easy to use is good for them. It’s good for their morale. It’s, again, it’s another one of those comforts that people want.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Imagine calling the office after, at the end of every job, four to six times a day to enter someone’s credit card.

Trevor Nix: I have a couple of teammates that talk about that all the time.

Trevor Nix: They couldn’t work up prices and estimates. They couldn’t do any of that stuff on site.

Rob Southern: Yeah. Is there, at this point, is there anything to be done by a tech after they drive away, or is it all, like, kinda taken care of?

Trevor Nix: Perfect scenario, they show up, they handle it all, it’s done. The only thing to be done after it is completed, after they’re done, is for our bookkeeping to go in and balance the books.

Trevor Nix: That’s, that’s it.

Alex Bridgeman: How do you train that customer? Like, that’s … It, the, that seems like the, like such an important, obviously it’s a really important piece is, like, training the customer interaction from the, the moment they drive up to when they leave, and making sure that that process has some consistency across multiple techs, each doing four to, I don’t know, three to six jobs a day.

Alex Bridgeman: Seems like a huge challenge. Like, how do you kind of address or go through all the different pieces of that process with any one customer? How do you help- It’s very

Trevor Nix: difficult. There’s really, I tell our guys all the time, we, there’s no black and white, right? We try and speak in black and whites because it’s easier to get somebody to understand a process when you’re speaking in black and whites, but there’s no such thing as black and white in our business.

Trevor Nix: Every customer is different. Every garage door is different. Every driveway is different. It’s constantly changing, and so S- learning how to read the gray and how to understand the gray and speak for yourself and, and tweak things to make it work better for you is really the only way that we’ve found success in doing it.

Trevor Nix: We’ve actually been criticized in the past for over-training our employees, which is very interesting to me and really hurts for me to hear people in our industry say that because of the amount of time that we believe it truly takes to have a technician trained that we’re comfortable with putting in front of our customers and taking care of them how we want them to be taken care of.

Trevor Nix: I know in the past and in my personal experiences and stories I’ve heard, some pretty scary things happen. They just send guys out there and make it happen and expect the best, you know? We like to have guys ride with multiple technicians that are trained already and are successful and do things the way we want them to, to be done.

Trevor Nix: That seems to work really well. And what I tell everybody is, “You’re going to take parts of what everybody does and mold them into what works for yourself.” And I think that that’s the reality. I’ve had a big I guess, aha moment in the last few years of realizing that there are a thousand ways to do things, and it doesn’t have to be done in one way.

Trevor Nix: And one term that I kinda use, I, I kinda joke about, is we, we always call them the ABCs, right? And I could put the ABC steps in front of you from step A through step Z on how you install a garage door. And ideally, it’d be awesome if we all did them exactly the same way, A through Z. But it’s not realistic because, again, every garage is different, every customer is different, every door is different, and every technician ultimately is different.

Trevor Nix: So what works for me to go from step B to C might just not make sense to you, and instead you like to go from B to D and then go back to C. And if that works for you, that’s fine. And what I joke about is I say, “Look, as long as your Z looks like mine and gets there relatively in about the same amount of time, I’m happy.

Trevor Nix: As long as the customer’s happy, we’re good.” So learning how to let go and how to let people think for themselves, I think has been majorly successful for us. I tell all the guys that I want them to feel like they kinda have their own little slice of the pie or their own little business within our business.

Trevor Nix: Mm. Because I want them to care like that. So that has been, uh, I think received well. I’ve heard a couple of the guys come back and tell me that it’s, they really utilize that mentality when they’re with clients. It’s been great. It’s also been interesting because every technician that I have right now h- has had previous experience at other door companies.

Trevor Nix: And until this, this group that I have right now, I had never had a technician that had previous experience. So it’s been really interesting because I’ve always been able to mold people in the way that we want them, at least relatively close. Again, they make it themselves, but, but at least close. And now I have, you know, five or six different guys that all do it five or six different ways, and it’s been hard for me to accept that, but they’re all great, and they all get raving reviews, and their craftsmanship is excellent.

Trevor Nix: So I really– I’ve, I’ve realized that you just can’t, you can’t always have it the exact way you want it, but it’s okay. It’ll work its way out

Rob Southern: What does someone who’s been doing this for 5 or 10 years know that someone who’s only been doing it for one doesn’t?

Trevor Nix: Oh, boy. That is a tough question. I think, I guess maybe the, the soft, the weak answer would just be experience.

Trevor Nix: Like I said, every garage door is different. Every garage is different. Every customer is different. But the more of them that you deal with, more of any topic, pick a topic, any, any that you deal with, the more experience you have on how to handle those situations. So again, if I were to give you the steps, you know, A through Z on how to install a garage door, sometimes garage doors don’t need step, you know, Y and Z because they’re already done, or this door specifically doesn’t come with those parts, or whatever the case may be.

Trevor Nix: So a lot of times, I would say that what a technician knows with a bunch of experience compared to a technician that doesn’t have as much experience is simply how to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that they may run into.

Rob Southern: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: Where somebody with less experience, and I’m speaking from experience because I ran into this many times when I was new, you hit a wall, and you don’t know where to go.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. So there’s a lot of what I call aha moments that people have in the garage door industry, in everything. But especially in the garage door industry for me, from speaking from my experience, learning how to back hang a door properly and how things need to be, you know, square, level, and plumb. You have these moments that you just go, “Oh, I get it.”

Trevor Nix: I will never forget the first extension spring I ever installed. I was over in Northeast Portland, and I had never done one before, and I was given this door. This is when I worked for another company first. I was given this door to go install. And they said, “Oh, it’s easy. You’ll figure it out.” “Okay, cool.

Trevor Nix: I’ll go figure it out.” And, and I, you know, being a confident young man, I was like, “Cool, I’ll figure it out. No problem I get out there and I get the door and everything installed, and I go to put the springs up. And I, for the life of me, I, I just, I was lost. I had no idea what to do. So I called my dad, right?

Trevor Nix: And I did that a lot as I was working with the other company, and they knew who he had. Obviously, they knew who he was and, and whatnot. It was actually one of my dad’s good friends. And I called him up and I said, “Okay, I’m dealing with an extension spring, and I’ve got this here and that there, and that…

Trevor Nix: What do I do?” And he starts laughing. And he’s laughing at me. He’s going, “Really? You can- really, you can’t figure this out?” And I remember getting so upset ’cause I was like, “Dude, just tell me what, where does the cable go? How do I hook it? You know, what do I do?” And speaking of aha moments, I will never forget when he goes, “Run this through here, run this back over here, and hook this there.”

Trevor Nix: And I just hooked the, hooked the S hook to the front of the track, and I just sat there on the phone with him and went, “Really?” Yeah. “That’s it?” But it was an aha moment, you know? And it instilled a lot of confidence in me of, I can figure this out. And if I would’ve just taken a break and not been so mad that I couldn’t figure it out, taken a deep breath, I probably would’ve figured it out.

Trevor Nix: But that’s, that’s, I guess, an answer to your question of, what do technicians that have experience know that technicians don’t have as much experience not know? It’s, it’s just a way to figure it out. You know, a way to, a way to overcome. My dad’s always said, “When you learn to become an installer, you learn how to install things.”

Trevor Nix: So I’ll have people ask me all the time, “Oh, I gotta…” You know, my grandfather asks me, “Hey, I gotta install this air conditioner and, you know, whatever, mini split or whatever here. You think you could help me?” Absolutely. I’ll figure it out,

Alex Bridgeman: no problem I’m getting a water filter installed here in a couple weeks, so-

Trevor Nix: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: There you go …

Alex Bridgeman: we’ll figure that out, too.

Trevor Nix: Perfect.

Alex Bridgeman: Get after it. There’s kinda, there’s a figured out-ness-

Trevor Nix: Yeah …

Alex Bridgeman: to experienced tech. So hold on. You worked for a company that was not your family business

Trevor Nix: first. Correct. So my story into the industry is a little bit interesting. I graduated college with an environmental studies degree, thinking, “Cool, I live in Portland.

Trevor Nix: That’ll be marketable. There’s a million jobs out there that have that.” And it, the environmental stuff was becoming a big deal. I had a cool internship with an oil company and, and my job was to… Well, I did a lot of different things, but the, the big environmental issue they were having at that time was they were having to learn how to deal with all the natural gas that was being emitted from the oil wells.

Trevor Nix: And what do we do with the gas? Because just flaring it and burning it and sending it into the atmosphere is not a good thing, right? So I had a cool, cool environmental studies job. So when I graduated… Actually, back up. When I came home from school my senior year in college with my internship, the price of oil was at $88 a barrel.

Trevor Nix: When I went back from winter break three weeks later, the price of oil had dropped to $44 a barrel. And when I walked into the office on Monday, my boss called me into his office and said, “Hey, we gotta pull your job offer. It’s w- it’s not there anymore. Money’s not there. We don’t have it.” So I immediately went to my advisor at school and said, “Hey, my, this is what just happened.

Trevor Nix: My dad owns a garage door company back home, and the chances are pretty good that eventually I’ll end up working there. Can I take some business classes?” She said, “Absolutely.” So she got me all signed up. Everything was all good. But when I graduated, boy, I still tried. I tried to stay out of it. I applied for, I don’t even, I can’t even count how many jobs I applied for.

Trevor Nix: And I was working sheet metal, roofing and siding in college for a local company here that I know through, know the, the owners through grapevine, also a family, multi-generational family company. And I knew I didn’t wanna do that long term, ’cause that was just beating me up. Maybe I’m soft, but that was beating me up pretty good.

Trevor Nix: And so I remember calling my dad at the end of that summer after I graduated and said, “Okay, Uncle, I quit.” Crying uncle. And I said, “I’m ready for a job.” And he goes, “Oh, that sucks. I just hired somebody. I don’t have any spots open for you.” And I said, “Oh. Okay.” And he goes, “But call Rob.” His, his good friend Rob, owned a company across town.

Trevor Nix: So I called Rob and we made an agreement and I started working indoors. And so there was kind of this loose understanding that after a while he would have an o- my dad would have an opening for me and I would, would end up coming to work in the business with him. And so about a y- right about a year later my dad was hiring again and called me up and said, “Okay, if you’re ready to come on, come on.”

Trevor Nix: So I did

Rob Southern: I keep going back to your comment that, like, every garage door is different. I wouldn’t think so. As, you know, a newcomer in the industry, what would surprise, like, y- the average homeowner about, you know, how their door or their garage, whatever their situation may be different from their neighbors or someone across town or in a different, like, you know, part of the country?

Trevor Nix: Sure. Interesting question. How to answer that strategically is tough. I mean, without getting into, like, the nuances and the, the simplicities of a garage door on things that could be different, right? Like, uh, it’s, like, e- I compare everything to a car. Everybody understands cars. Mm-hmm. Right? You have a Ford F-150, and I have a Chevy 1500.

Trevor Nix: Are they really that different? Well, in the grand scheme of a vehicle, of a half-ton truck, no. But yeah, just about every single nut and bolt on that truck is different from one another. Mm-hmm. So without getting into that type of thing, I would say one of the biggest differences that might surprise somebody, I think something that might really surprise somebody that knows nothing about garage doors is how much kinetic energy is stored within the springs on the garage door.

Trevor Nix: And the actual lifting or counterbalance mechanism of one garage door to another garage door can be vastly different. Hmm. So there are multiple kinds of garage doors and the way that they operate, whether they are… we call them shin kickers or a one-piece garage door that tilts up. Like, pe- some people call them tilt-up doors.

Trevor Nix: Whether they’re sectional garage doors, whether they have extension springs, going back to extension springs, or torsion springs. There are other manufacturers that make kind of a safety style spring. One of them’s called a Torque Master, so it has the same thing as a torsion spring, but it’s all internal, has different parts.

Trevor Nix: So there’s just a lot of nuances about garage doors that could be vastly different from one another to where I couldn’t confidently take a technician out that I’ve trained on how to install one type of spring and just send him to somebody’s house without somebody else going there because there’s a very good chance it’ll be a different type of spring.

Trevor Nix: So I don’t know if that totally answers your question, but…

Rob Southern: No, it does. And also, I mean, you said earlier that you send your new techs out with multiple techs.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm.

Rob Southern: And like, inevitably, they’re gonna get exposure to, you know, something that, you know, this guy has experience with that that guy didn’t, and so you’re kind of cross-pollinating that way.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. Yep Yeah, with garage doors and clients. We do a lot of, uh… Well, a lot is relative. We try to do some DiSC training, DiSC assessment training and stuff with personality training testing and stuff with our, our technicians when they start to help them understand how to deal with clients. Because we all know, and anybody that’s been in any kind of customer service knows, that they are both the best and worst part of the job.

Trevor Nix: Mm. You know, and I tell everybody, “You have 100 clients that are just awesome, and you r- truly enjoyed them, and you could go have dinner with them, and they invite you into their house half the time.” I’ve had, I’ve had clients come out with a sandwich in the middle of an install and say, “Hey, sit down, have a sandwich with me.

Trevor Nix: I made you lunch.” I mean, it’s just awesome. And then you have one bad client that you just can’t please, and it makes you go, “Why do we do this? Why am I here?” You know, one… I’ll steal this quote, and I’ll credit it to my wife. I think she heard something along the lines of, of this from somebody else, but what she likes to say is, “You could be the juiciest, sweetest, ripest peach in the world, and some people don’t like peaches.”

Trevor Nix: So I think dealing with clients is, frankly, probably every bit as hard or important, uh, as learning how to work on a garage door. For, for the… That’s, let me take that back. For the way that we run our business, because we do everything as very personal and personalized. So again, you know, one thing that I may quote for you, Rob, might be you might have the same garage door as Alex, and I might give you a quote for X number of dollars because of the conversation that I had with you and the relationship that you and I built compared to the relationship and conversation that I had with Alex might be different because I found out that you use your garage door seven times a day, and you’ve got four kids, and that’s how they come in from school.

Trevor Nix: And I’m like, “Oh, my goodness. Here’s what I recommend for you.” And Alex goes, “Well, mine’s a wood shop. I open it once a month.” Mm. Well, your spring broke and your spring broke, but you would have a highly different recommendation coming from me than Alex would for that very reason. So there’s just a lot of nuances on I guess all facets of the business and, and being a technician.

Rob Southern: If you’re trying to fill a tech position and you’ve got two applicants and one is, you know, great with customers and the other really knows garage doors, and you, you’ve gotta pick one and you’re gonna have to train them on the gap, do you have a preference?

Trevor Nix: Easy, and it would be the person that can deal with customers.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. There’s a, a lot of people call it the beer test, right? Or the dinner test. If I’m interviewing somebody, would I ta- would I go to dinner with this person? Mm-hmm. Would I go have a beer with this person? And that is huge for me. Heck, the last four or five people that I’ve hired, that I’ve interviewed, I’ve had two-hour interviews with because we just find ourselves sitting in my office, you know, shooting the breeze and having a good time.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm. And to me, that’s a very good sign. You know, I’ve had interviews with people where they walk in and I’m like, as the interviewer going, “Wow, how can I make this as short as possible?” Yeah. And it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. They, it’s just some- something, whatever the case may be, is not jiving.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: So to me, I can teach you how to do garage doors.

Trevor Nix: You know, that’s, that’s no problem at all. That’s my bread and butter. I can’t teach you how to be a people person. You can’t train personality. A person has their personality. You can teach them and give them tricks and ha- try to help alter things to maybe make things easier for them. But I, as, in my opinion, I don’t believe you can truly train personality.

Trevor Nix: That’s something that’s inherent within.

Rob Southern: Yeah, you can develop in the right direction if they’ve got the DNA, right? But if, if their DNA is kinda different, you can’t

Trevor Nix: teach them. Exactly. Yeah. Yep. And, and maybe they’re great with clients, but they didn’t mesh well with me, or they walk in the front door and I saw the way that they talk to our office people.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm. And then they, then they, it, it changed when he turned and shook my hand or something. I, we notice those things, you know? As people that are gonna be managers or be in charge of people that are dealing with people- Mm-hmm … who, by the way, write your paycheck. Mm-hmm. You know? Uh, one thing I would say is customers are not always right, but they do always write your paycheck.

Trevor Nix: So if I can’t mesh with somebody in a way that I know that I talk and converse with my clients, how’s that gonna work when I’m expecting them to converse with my clients? Mm-hmm. So that’s a tough one. Easy answer, though, is, is definitely I would take the person that is the personable, upbeat, ready to go, easy to converse with human over the person that is the best technician in the world, but doesn’t mesh well with people for our business model.

Alex Bridgeman: In, in thinking about training techs on customer service and, you know, there’s gonna be customers who are, are difficult, and you have to figure out how to do that. But have you found any common threads for why customers would be difficult with a tech, either from just not understanding a quote or what you mean?

Alex Bridgeman: And is there some way to kind of preempt or prevent a lot of common misunderstandings? And maybe what are some of those that you try to train?

Trevor Nix: That’s also a great question. To nail it down to specifics, I would say no. I haven’t really, we haven’t really had anything that was, seems to be a common problem that really sticks out like a sore thumb.

Trevor Nix: There’s always something, somebody didn’t understand a quote, somebody didn’t, you know, somebody misinterpreted what the technician said. Maybe one is, well, the office said this, and now the technician’s standing there in front of them saying this. One thing I always tell my team is you have to trust your teammates, and you always have to trust your teammates first because unfortunately, a common term is people hear what they wanna hear.

Trevor Nix: Mm. And when you’re speaking to somebody in person, it’s way different than the feelings that you have and the confidence that you may have when speaking to somebody over the phone. And so, you know, I hear it a lot where s- one of my guys will call me and say, “Hey, so and so customer just told me that so and so teammate or our other technician said this.”

Trevor Nix: And, and I like to kinda chuckle, and I go, “Okay, do you really think that our teammate said that? Does that really sound like something our team would say?” So that’s one big thing. The other thing would be technology. Again, using technology and using your CRMs or your FSMs properly, being able to highlight and make it very obvious with various line items and prices and the way that, that Workiz in particular works or, you know, companies like ServiceTitan or Jobber or Housecall Pro, they do a really good job at making it cut and dry and making the process pretty simple to repeat, and things like getting signatures, trying to make things really clear.

Trevor Nix: But that’s probably the biggest thing, is the miscommunications that happen between the phone, the initial CSR conversation with the customer, and then our technicians and the customer probably tends to be the, the biggest hiccup that happens.

Rob Southern: And, like, what, what actually, what actually happens? Is it, you know, they go out thinking they’re gonna do one type of job, and so their g- their, their truck is, you know, stocked with that kind of equipment and, and parts, and it’s actually a different job, or?

Trevor Nix: I would tell you more often than not, it ends up being price. Okay. Price is a really tough one, and boy, we could do an entire podcast just on price and learning how to deal with price with customers, and this isn’t something you guys are unfamiliar with, obviously. But, you know, we do our best on the phone to avoid giving prices, and that’s not to be dodgy.

Trevor Nix: But the reality is, you know, one thing I always say, again, going back to cars, is when you call me and say, “Hey, my garage door is doing this and making this sound, and it’s, it won’t open. How much does that cost?” It’s the same thing as you just called the auto technician and said, “Hey, my car is making this noise, and it sounds like bang, bang, clunk, clunk.

Trevor Nix: What’s wrong with it, and how much does that cost?” I have no idea. I gotta take a look, right? So we try to avoid giving prices. L- let me, let me phrase it differently. We try to avoid diagnosing over the phone, right? Because a diagnosis will give you the price. We’ll be able to, once we diagnose it, tell you what’s wrong, how to fix it, and here are your options.

Trevor Nix: Mm. Right? So That is a really common issue that happens where the person doesn’t wanna book the call, the customer doesn’t wanna book the call with the CSR because we’re not giving them a price, because we don’t know what the price is gonna be. And the classic thing is, “Well, it could cost… Put it this way, it could cost $500 or it could cost 1,000.”

Trevor Nix: Well, what did the customer just hear? It’s gonna cost $500. So when we show up and go, “Okay, here it is. It’s actually gonna cost you 850,” no, no, the office said 500. Mm. Well, now you got a fight on your hands, right? Or you’re just gonna lose the client, ’cause now they’re not happy. And now, now nobody wins. Yeah.

Trevor Nix: So one thing we try to do is we try to create the win triangle. We try to create a situation where at the end of the experience, the customer wins, the company wins, and the technician wins, and everybody’s happy. Mm-hmm. Right? Whatever that may look like, whether that’s a big sale and the technician won and the company won and the customer’s just elated because their door works better than new, or whether that be something very simple that we decided was gonna be a warranty because we’re gonna stand behind our work and the technician gets a great review, the customer’s happy as heck, and the company’s happy because we have a return customer down the road when their door breaks.

Trevor Nix: So whatever the case may be. So I would tell you, to answer your question, the biggest issue that we would have between communication between the office and the client and the technician, the three-way communication, would be when they demand a price in order to get them on the schedule. Mm-hmm. And not fully understanding what that’s gonna look like.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm. You know, and as the business owner, I always try to step back and go, “What can I do differently?” Well, one thing that I can do differently is I can continue to work with our CSRs to train them on how to portray what each cost that they may give, if they unfortunately have to, is actually going to cover.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. But that’s hard to do

Rob Southern: You’ve been in business a long time. I imagine you’ve played around with, like, different compensation schemes for techs.

Trevor Nix: Mm-hmm.

Rob Southern: Are there any, like, tried and true lessons there? Like, do it this way, don’t do it that way?

Trevor Nix: Yeah, it’s a good question as well. So one thing that our company doesn’t do, and this is not to bag on anybo- any company that does.

Trevor Nix: I, I believe it’s a great way to pay. I believe it’s a great way to incentivize and a way to produce more profit for your company or, a- a- and, and even for your technician, is we don’t pay a commission. And I know commission can be paid in many ways. We implemented a program, uh, I kinda came up with this program here, I guess I would say about four years ago, maybe five, six years ago, where I was trying to determine, how can I incentivize our technicians to continue to sell things, not just for the sake of selling them, but to offer options to the client that might want them?

Trevor Nix: How can I incentivize them to do so that will help increase our average ticket, make the customers more happy, and make the technicians more money, again, creating the win triangle? And without paying commission, being a flat rate or, I guess, a percentage of profit or a percentage of whatever the part costs or whatever the case may be for the, for the commission, I came up with a program that we call the incentive program that is a way for me to incentivize our technicians to continue to sell things and increase their average tickets and make more money themselves and more money for the company, but still kinda control the way that they do and the fashion that they do it.

Trevor Nix: Mm. And what I mean by that is, instead of doing a flat percentage off of whatever the total number that they sell may be, or off of the, what the profit from the product that they sell is, or however somebody may work their commission base- We, I chose a handful of products or items that we can sell for a garage door that I know are 10 out of 10 times a good repair or a repair for the long term or whatever the case may be, that have a good margin that the customer will be happy on that I know that we stock.

Trevor Nix: So again, a way to create that win triangle again through both the profits and the cost as well as the performance of the door and the happiness of the customer in the future. So things like preventative items. You know, if I show up to your house and you say, “Oh, my garage door opener doesn’t work,” and I can look at your springs and go, “Well, they’re caked in an inch thick of rust.

Trevor Nix: Maybe we should replace those as well to make sure that the new garage door opener I install is gonna actually last.” Right. Well, that was preventative. They didn’t call you about the spring. Yeah. But now you sold a spring, right? And I have that set price of what that spring costs. So they can’t just look at you, Rob, and go, “Oh, you have lots of money, live in this big old house.

Trevor Nix: I’m gonna charge you more because now I can make more money on my 20% commission,” or, you know, pick a number. So that, to answer your question in terms of things that we’ve done in pay over time, we’ve had people be on salary that really bit us in the rear. We’ve had people be on salary that have been fantastic.

Trevor Nix: Mm. We believe that people deserve to be paid and to have the right people that you want in place and to get them to stay, they need to be paid. So we tend to pay a higher base hourly wage as well as commissions and whatever, or, or, um, incentives and stuff on top of them, and offer bigger benefits and things like that.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. Rather than paying a lower base rate wage or salary, whatever, with a higher percentage commission. Mm-hmm. If that makes sense. If that answers your question. So have we found the, the, the key and the secret sauce? No. Everybody’s big rant and rave right now is performance pay, as I’m sure you guys know and have heard of.

Trevor Nix: And this is a, it’s a, a mild version of performance pay. It’s, it’s kinda, it’s basically what it is without being a percentage and without tracking every single item that they sell. We track the w- the important ones or the common ones that we know are gonna be good repairs.

Rob Southern: Sure. And so you know anytime one of your techs sells one of those products that your customer’s gonna be happy with it and you’re gonna make some, uh, you know, appropriate margin for your business.

Rob Southern: Absolutely. Yep. Makes sense. I would imagine as an employee, you know, uh, obviously having a wage is like certainty of income. The alternative though, for you all, is that now you really have to keep that person busy. Like, if someone has a slow week and they’re paid on commission, the business isn’t paying them to sit around, but the employee doesn’t have work, so maybe they’re gonna go where they can find it, right?

Rob Southern: So it’s kind of a balance that you’re striking.

Trevor Nix: Absolutely. Yeah. Kind of back to earlier what I was saying, how important it is to make your employees happy and how, you know, your employ- your employees are the most important thing. That they’re more important than the customer. Mm. And a lot of people, that’s a, that was a, a real change of mindset that we had to have, is that realizing our employees are more important than the customer.

Trevor Nix: And everybody gets that can have multiple opinions and whatever they wanna think on that, because while with no customers, you have, you have employees for no reason. But you could have all the customers in the world, and if you don’t have employees, well, you just spent money for those customers and completely wasted it, right?

Trevor Nix: So we look at it the other way and go, “Okay, well, our team is by far the most important part,” and that’s not to say our customers are not. But we need to have faith within, and we need to have our employees and our teammates have faith within that they’re gonna be taken care of to properly take care of our customers the way that we want them to be taken care of.

Trevor Nix: Mm. So it’s, we’ve kind of shifted our mentality to really understand what people these days in the workforce want and how we can better their quality of life and quality of work life to then get the performance out of them that the business needs to survive. Mm. So it’s been, it’s been monumental in the last handful of years for our business.

Trevor Nix: What spurred that change in structure? Like, what was it look, what did it look like before, like how tech got paid, and what prompted the shift? Well, what it looked like before was guys made hourly wages, you know? And they, they wanted more money, they worked more. And you know, we were a lot smaller back then when it was kind of like that, and the reality was we had the work to work overtime all the time.

Trevor Nix: In fact, I just have a guy with me now who’s been with us a long time, and he talks about, you know, he used to work 68 hours a week, and if he wanted to make more money to pay his mortgage down a little more this month, he just took on more jobs, worked more, and he made a lot of money, and it was good. But the new age workforce doesn’t wanna do that, you know?

Trevor Nix: The… I’ve, I joke about the work till 5:00 PM, the whole mindset of working till 5:00 PM or the art of working till 5:00 PM is no more. Mm. It’s not a thing anymore. People don’t wanna do that. People wanna go home. Time’s more important. And I would tell you- Pretty much every one of my employees would tell you, or tell me right to my face, that time and their families are more important to them than working.

Trevor Nix: Which is great. That’s how it should be, and that’s what we believe. Again, we’re a family business. I say to somebody every single day within our company that family comes first. Just yesterday, my grandma took a spill yesterday, and I had to leave in the middle of the day and go take my grandma to the urgent care and get her, her broken foot all taken care of.

Trevor Nix: Literally yesterday. And, you know, I- Is it good?

Alex Bridgeman: Is it fine now?

Trevor Nix: Yeah, she’s a- she’s all good. She’s taken care of. Okay. She’s got referred to a specialist. She broke her foot and sprained her wrist and a couple things. She, she’s okay. Thank you for asking. But, you know, I had stuff on my day that I was gonna go do, and I reached out.

Trevor Nix: In fact, one of our guys, our salesman, Scott, called me when I was sitting in the, in the room with her, and I had to forward his call and text him back, say, “Hey, Grandma took a spill. I’m still planning on coming out there. I’m just gonna be late. Sorry.” And he emailed me, or, or text messaged me back and said, “Take care of Grandma.

Trevor Nix: Family first.” Because that’s a, it’s a, a culture that we’ve tried to build within because it’s the truth. But, you know, that being said, there’s a, there’s a level of, well, when the fire’s hot, you gotta get on it, or when the getting’s good, you gotta get it, and if you wanna make money, you gotta work. So walking that line and having that balance is important these days, and understanding that as an owner and a manager of people is, I think, incredibly important to your success and, and what it’s gonna look like in the future of keeping employees long-term, or do you need to hire more employees or do you have too many employees or whatever the case may be.

Trevor Nix: And a lot of times that can be market dependent. You know, we oftentimes r- in our industry rely on the summer months to be our crazy months. Everybody’s using their garage door more. They’re outside more. It goes up and down. They’re getting a lawnmower in and out. So we’re often busier in the summer. Well, we kinda joke that, hey, man, when it’s time to work, work.

Trevor Nix: That’s when you make your money But that’s not really how today’s employee wants to work anymore. So balancing a way of, like, kind of like you were, were alluding to, Rob, of continuing to keep that phone ringing and get that work coming in constantly to have the ability for them to work their hours- Mm-hmm

Trevor Nix: is hard. That’s, that’s a constant balance for me.

Rob Southern: What about the, like, nights and weekends emergencies or just, like, managing responsiveness too? Do you have certain kind of, like, employees that, that opt into that call, or are you taking those calls or?

Trevor Nix: Yeah, it’s a great question as well. We also incentivize them for various things.

Trevor Nix: Mm. So we take emergency calls. Frankly, we do it pretty rarely. We’re a small family business, and I try to tell everybody, like, “Look, I don’t wanna work nights and weekends if I don’t have to.” I do, and I do it all the time. That’s just the nature of being a business owner, but I don’t wanna have to make them do it if they don’t wanna do it either.

Trevor Nix: So if they’re gonna do it, we… for instance, if they take an emergency call and we’re, we charge emergency fees, we give them an extra $100 for that call, plus their regular wages, plus whatever incentives they make when they sell it. And again, that’s a way to create the win triangle. The customer’s happy we could be there, they’re happy because they made extra money, and the company made money because they went.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. So it’s, it’s kind of the same idea. For the weekends, we don’t do Sundays. We are now on a revolving Saturday schedule where we have one technician kind of on call and ready for Saturdays when things come up And we have, during the week we have a revolving schedule for late nights. There’s one technician who is just kind of ready and on call for a job that may come in later.

Trevor Nix: The reality is we don’t do the 24 hour emergency service. We should. We have an answering service that answers the phone and takes care of those things, and I always get notifications where I can help manage that if something were to come up where I could go do it myself.

Rob Southern: Mm-hmm.

Trevor Nix: Which I have. I’ve been sitting at home watching TV at 10:00 PM and I, you know, see a note or whatever come through from a customer that I know is, you know, our little old lady in whatever retirement community, and I’ll call her up and go jump in the truck and take care of it because I recognize it.

Trevor Nix: But as for an official schedule and repeatable service for that type of thing, we have not implemented that yet because we’re small enough now that I don’t think we have to. I think one of our avenues for growth is to do that, is to have a full-time weekend crew and go seven days a week.

Rob Southern: I have a question.

Rob Southern: There are a lot of garage door companies, even within, you know, Tigard or Portland or wherever. Why do you think the market, like, supports so many? Do they come and go? Right. There’s so many also individuals, right, who it’s like Jack’s Garage Door, and it’s one guy in a truck and, like, why is the market like that?

Trevor Nix: It’s funny you say that. Jack’s Overhead Door actually is one of the companies in town. They’re one of the longest companies in town. My grandpa and Jack used to work together at Crawford Door. You know, that’s interesting because Portland is a tough market, and there are companies that have come in here, very, very large successful companies that have come into Portland and left because their resources could have been used better elsewhere and they just weren’t finding the success in the Portland market specifically for garage doors that they have in other markets.

Trevor Nix: It’s not a licensed trade, which I think is a huge, huge problem, and it’s terribly unfortunate, and I really wish there was a way we could push it to become a licensed trade. Yes, you have to have a business. You have to have insurance. You have to have a bond. You have to have a, a business license- Mm … to be in the, in the garage door industry.

Trevor Nix: But you don’t have to be certified in garage doors and be licensed to work on a garage door. Mm-hmm. I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for our industry, unfortunately. That being said, there are a lot of suppliers as well that will just sell to anybody, which is really unfortunate, especially with the, the dangers that do come with the garage door industry and, you know, again, that loaded spring.

Trevor Nix: In garage doors that can weigh hundreds and hundreds or thousands of pounds and, you know, there’s one spring that’s, or two springs or s- 10 springs that are storing all that energy to counterweight or counterbalance that s- that door. Mm. So I think that having manufacturers that will sell to anybody or suppliers that will sell to anybody and the fact that it’s an unlicensed trade makes it a really easy way to just buy a truck and have a few parts on your truck and just put a phone or an ad in the phone book or, you know, put a picture on a park bench and have somebody call you and go do it.

Trevor Nix: I think that also because of the fact that it’s unlicensed, it allows people to really undercut pricing on a lot of different things. Then it becomes a price war. Mm. Which that’s not uncommon. That’s not just, you know, solely our industry, of course. But I think that there’s a lot of combinations and things that happen in the garage door industry and in our market specifically that allow people to just start up a garage door company and start running calls.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. To your question of do they work their, their way out? Yeah. When I was, when I was younger and first getting into the business, I used to get all hot and bothered about all the new companies and the customer would call me and go, “Oh, this, this guy told me he could do it for this much.” And I’d tell the customer, “I’ve never even heard of them.”

Trevor Nix: Yeah. “And our family’s been in the industry for 35 years. How do you know? What do you mean? Who is that?” Yeah. Now, as I get older and I’ve been in it long enough, I’ve seen it and, you know, I, I don’t fault anybody for it. Look at us. It’s how we started. Mm-hmm. You know, I think it’s great. So I think that the good ones will find their way to succeed and, and it’s friendly competition, and there’s enough out there for all of us, and I think that the not so good ones will weed themselves out and we don’t worry about them anymore.

Trevor Nix: It’s okay.

Rob Southern: So it’s, it’s easy to get started, but it’s harder than it looks, and as a result, there’s just kind of a lot of churn in that, in that, yeah, long tail of, of, yeah.

Trevor Nix: With how many dozens of companies there are in our market, there’s not that many that have been around. Well, there’s very, very few that have been around as long as we have.

Trevor Nix: Mm. And there’s only a handful more that have been around for, you know, even a decade or more. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that- It’s a great industry. I think that we’ve got a lot of growth and improvement we could make within the industry. I think there’s a lot of big companies out there, like A1 Garage Door Service, that is really doing a great job of pushing our industry to be better and to be, you know, have a new standard that we hold ourselves to.

Trevor Nix: I think that’s fantastic. You know, they get a, they get a bad look in a lot of cases, but, you know, see the forest for the trees and understand what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make everybody make more money and win and offer better services to the clients. And again, you know, same thing.

Trevor Nix: Create the win triangle for everybody, for our whole industry.

Rob Southern: You said Portland’s a tough market. What, what makes Portland tough or any, you know, market tougher than another?

Trevor Nix: That’s a hard one for me to answer because I only have experience within the Portland market. You know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it’s a tough market and, and the various things that go on that maybe make it tough.

Trevor Nix: It might be the competition. It might be the way that the city’s laid out. I don’t know because it’s all I know. So I don’t have a confident or intelligent, I guess, way to answer that question with experience Works for us.

Rob Southern: Coming up on four years And then thought about literally, like, city planning, right?

Rob Southern: You know, if you’re in Arizona, there’s 20 ways to get somewhere.

Trevor Nix: Sure.

Rob Southern: If you’re here and you own a house in the southwest, like, there’s one road.

Trevor Nix: Sure.

Rob Southern: You know?

Trevor Nix: Oh, my gosh. Just talk, talk about traffic. I wanna talk about another struggle in paying people hourly wages is, is windshield time. Oh, my goodness.

Trevor Nix: Yeah. Even when I started, I mean, it was… You know, you go to the east side of town, cool. Just hop in the truck, it’s 15, 20 minutes over there. Now we gotta go to the east side of town, we gotta plan it. We gotta plan the day and make sure everybody knows where we’re going, and you don’t just hop over there anymore.

Trevor Nix: Traffic is horrible. Yeah. That’s a huge obstacle we’ve had to learn how to overcome and learn how to dispatch properly and schedule accordingly. Mm-hmm.

Alex Bridgeman: In that sense, is there value in adding offices around the city specifically for that kind of purpose? Like, have a guy or, like, o- one or two trucks based in, you know, Clackamas or something like that.

Trevor Nix: I would definitely say yes, that there’s value in that. I think that it is really spreading your resources, and it would have to be well done to be efficient. I think that also part of the reason we haven’t done that is we’ve found a lot of value in having a, a centralized home base where people can come and build camaraderie and have teammates within that you trust and you have relationships with.

Trevor Nix: I think that having satellite offices that people really go to is, is fine, especially with the technology nowadays and the way that you can connect with, you know, Zoom calls and phone calls and everything else, I think could be very successful. But also at the same time, if you can schedule properly, going to the east side of town or whatever for us in, in this case, because we’re on the west side, it’s not that big of a deal.

Trevor Nix: It’s not that, not that much of a drive. So I don’t know that I see the value in having satellite offices within the same right close area market, because it’s not that big of a deal for us to… Again, if we can schedule properly and efficiently, back to the efficient word, we can plan that out to where it’s no big deal.

Trevor Nix: We have all the stuff, and we can still keep that centralized space where our team can come and be a team and enjoy each other and converse and get to know each other better. So yes, but not necessarily for us. That being said, I think if we were a whole lot bigger and a whole lot busier and had calls going all the time, we were just going gangbusters, yeah, for sure.

Trevor Nix: If we could take the 30-minute drive out and instead have everybody have a 15-minute drive every day or less, cutting drive time in half, it saves huge expense. So sure, it also saves, again, back to the employee, it saves them a lot of time. They can be home sooner and be with their families, which is what people want.

Trevor Nix: So yes, I think in a much, much larger scale than we are at

Rob Southern: We’ve talked a lot about building a garage door business, but when it comes to just building any business, y- y- you mentioned, you know, having a centralized location where people come together, build camaraderie. What are some of the things you do just from a company building standpoint, you know, that distinguish you guys or, or that define your, your culture?

Trevor Nix: I love that question. Something we’ve really actually tried to lean into, in fact, two weeks ago, a little less than two weeks ago, we had a company sponsored camping trip we went on. My wife and I specifically, I credit her a lot for this because she’s really helped kinda push me into that. We try to– We are trying more often to do more things to get the company involved and together outside of work.

Trevor Nix: I think that having relationships outside of work and getting to know your teammates that you work day in and day out with in a different fashion, in a way that was more themselves, is important to help truly understand each other and build a relationship that could be long-lasting. I think having your employees be friends with each other, with a within reason to a certain extent, is a great thing to help longevity and having your employees stick around and to create that true family feel.

Trevor Nix: So we try and minimum do at least one summer event and one winter event. You know, we do an end of the year gathering. You know, a lot of people refer to it as a Christmas party or whatever. We just try to call it an end of the year celebration. Everybody gets together and, you know, we sponsor it at wherever we may go, some, you know, local restaurant or couple years in a row, which was so much fun, we did a, a company sponsored escape room.

Trevor Nix: And you know, we, we did that. We had the idea that it’d be really cool to be able to split up into two teams and do two rooms, and then compete against each other and make it a fun, fun game, fun competition, and then we would, you know, walk down the road to, to dinner and have a company dinner afterwards.

Trevor Nix: Last year, we went to Langer’s Family Fun Center, and we rented a room in there and had dinner, and then everybody got a game card to go play in the arcade or go bowling or whatever else, that type of thing.

Rob Southern: I was gonna ask ’cause it’s just the employees or families too?

Trevor Nix: So we do the winter one we do adults only, so employees and spouses.

Trevor Nix: The summer one we try to do all family. Yeah, so we try to include everybody. Again, for that reason of you get different feels of different people, how are they gonna act when their kids are there? How are they gonna act when there’s no kids? How are they gonna act if it’s just employees? It’s everything’s different and everybody acts differently in different situations and it’s just really– It’s been really fun for me and my wife, I know Katie’s really enjoyed it, to get to know people outside of just what you see at work every day.

Alex Bridgeman: Also, I have to imagine that seeing everyone’s families, you know, knowing that you’re a, you’re a small company, like you rely on each other to make money together, and you know that your work is helping not just them, but their spouse and their kids that you’re standing in front of.

Trevor Nix: That is one of my biggest passions, Alex.

Trevor Nix: I tell everybody all the time that I love the fact that- That our business is something that I can do actively every day is supporting generations, and more than just my team. I’m supporting my team, their wives, and their kids, and their house they may own, or rent, or they’re wanting to buy a house, or whatever the case may be.

Trevor Nix: I love that. You know? I mean, that’s what I grew up with, right? This business supported me as I was growing up. It supported my… It still supports my grandparents, right? Like, we still, we still all are family and, and a community and support each other. Heck, we all live on the same road. Mm. You know? And it’s…

Trevor Nix: I, I’m just, I’m so passionate about the fact that something that I can do helps give back. It helps support me and my lifestyle and my family, and also my teammates and their lifestyles and their families and their futures, and that’s, that is, like, one of my largest burning passions every day on why I do what I do.

Trevor Nix: I absolutely love that.

Alex Bridgeman: Have you had the summer one yet?

Trevor Nix: We just did the camping trip. Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s right. Camped a couple weeks ago. What are you thinking for, for winter? In January. Do, do you want ideas?

Trevor Nix: We don’t… Ooh, ideas. I’m all in for ideas.

Alex Bridgeman: Well, have you been to the Long Beach Snow Peak campground?

Trevor Nix: No.

Alex Bridgeman: Up in Washington?

Trevor Nix: Uh-uh.

Alex Bridgeman: One of our board members went there with her, her husband, and it looked awesome.

Trevor Nix: Okay. That sounds fun, up in Long Beach.

Rob Southern: Winter, winter camping.

Alex Bridgeman: Yep.

Trevor Nix: Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s-

Trevor Nix: That’s fun …

Alex Bridgeman: you, I mean, you could, yeah. Yeah,

Trevor Nix: yeah, you could do it … bring your dog.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah.

Trevor Nix: We’ve talked about doing, like, going up to, like, Timberline Lodge or something and renting a few rooms or, you know, something like that.

Trevor Nix: The winter ones are tougher because, again, we try to make that one the adults-only thing, and people can drink if they want, and whatever. We can control it. You know, we tell people, “If you’re gonna drink, the company will Uber you home. You know, you can Uber there and Uber back. We’ll reimburse you.” But yeah, the, the summer ones tend to be a little bit easier to, to plan because you can…

Trevor Nix: Th- there’s more options. It’s nicer out. You can do different things. Yeah. You can involve the kids and, you know, every parent loves to do what their kids love to do, so that’s fun. But yeah, I, I, well, we haven’t really thought too hard about this, this winter one yet, ’cause we’re kinda getting there. Still in the weeds of, you know, playing the summer game and, and dealing with the busy schedule.

Alex Bridgeman: Well, please bounce ideas off us, too. We, we enjoy, like, thinking about and planning stuff like that, so, like, we’re happy to- Love it … be a sounding board. But- You bet … um, Trevor, thanks for doing this. This was super fun.

Trevor Nix: Of course. Thanks for having

Alex Bridgeman: me. Thanks for hosting us as part of it. You