Bobby (00:00):
The next job is always in the current job. If we neglect a relationship and then that person leaves, we’ve lost the opportunity. So I think the biggest thing that they want is just someone that does what they say.


Adam (00:13):
Welcome to Jobber’s Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros by home service pros. We’re in Las Vegas, and today we’re talking about how a business owner went from zero to 2 million in just three years. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. Today’s guest, the guy who did it, is Bobby Vickers. Bobby, welcome to the studio.


Bobby (00:31):
Thanks for having me.


Adam (00:32):
Yeah. Tell our listeners who you are, what you do, and all that kind of stuff.


Bobby (00:34):
Yeah, so my name is Bobby Vickers. I’m the co-founder of Doorvana Garage Doors. We are a garage door manufacturer, and we also offer turnkey garage door solutions for residences and commercial properties in North Texas. And just recently, Austin, Texas.


Adam (00:49):
Okay.


Bobby (00:49):
And I did not do it alone. My business partner is amazing. I couldn’t do it without him. He just couldn’t be here today.


Adam (00:55):
Gotcha. Okay. Good. Shout out to him. Yeah, so that’s quick growth, and I think a lot of our listeners are curious how does someone go to 2 million in such a short amount of time? Because there’s a lot of people out there that have been in business for a lot longer who aren’t at that revenue, which is fine. But for someone who is wanting to go to that next level, maybe they plateaued a little bit. How did you keep that growth going so quickly up in a consistent way?


Bobby (01:20):
I think the main difference in our business is that we are not just a service company. So we don’t just come in and service something that you have. We actually own a manufacturing facility that is because of my business partner, and the whole reason I joined the business was his experience and his ability to build things. So we have a manufacturing facility that allows us to have a different conversation when we talk to a prospect. So when we talk to someone, it’s not, Hey, we buy this thing from somebody, we make this thing, we know this thing. My business partner has been building these since he was 15, so 27 years on and off. So I think for us, our approach to business is just different. We’re not necessarily a markup business where we’re buying a product or service and just marking up a little bit of labor. We’re manufacturing garage doors and installing them. And our client base also is different. So where if you typically start a home service business, let’s say pressure washing,


(02:21):
And you’re trying to get homeowners in a neighborhood, well, there’s no scale to that. You’re going to have to talk to each homeowner for each job. Well, our approach to business has always been to take what the other companies don’t want because it’s underserved. So we want a builder that’s going to build 10 homes a year because that’s 10 jobs that could be 30 doors and openers with service down the road. So our approach to business, our go-to-market, has just been we want more jobs or more clients that are going to create lifetime value instead of just going after a lot of homeowners. So that’s been the biggest thing. There risk to that. There is a severe risk to that. We have probably two clients that make up 30% of our billings. That’s tough if you’re looking at publicly traded companies or business in general, that’s not ideal, but that’s what helped us get to where we are today, and we just have to continue to diversify and expand. So that number of that concentration among those couple of clients gets diluted.


Adam (03:25):
So, someone like me I’m the complete opposite. I’d rather serve a thousand clients because if I lose 50 of them, it’s fine, but you’re servicing very few, but hey, you only have to put all your attention into those few clients. The downside is if you happen to lose one, then it hurts more, but it’s a very different ball game. But that seems to suit your personality better.


Bobby (03:46):
I think it does. And part of the reason why is with builders, production builders, the commercial side of the business, it’s more of a business transaction. It’s not as emotional. So the builders that are building a hundred production homes, they’re not going to live in it. What they need to do is ensure that the job was done properly, that it passes inspection, and that we answer the phone call. I have not received an emergency phone call from a builder ever, where a homeowner will call because the garage door is noisy, which is fine because we didn’t set the proper expectation. It’s always our fault as a business owner— one thing you have to say about everything in your business is it is your fault. An employee’s not doing right. It’s your fault. A customer is unhappy, it’s your fault. It’s not that you did it, that you were the lever. It’s that you didn’t enable a system in place to solve it beforehand. So it’s your fault. So yes, the relationship part of it, the service part of it, support, it’s much easier with businesses and commercial, but again, you have the risk of somebody else going, Hey, I’ll do that for less.


(04:57):
And so we run into that, and we just deal with it the best that we can. Since I started in 2022, we haven’t lost a builder. I think that says a lot about our commitment to serving them. We’re very responsive, and we don’t charge for a lot of things that with a homeowner you would have to. So that’s the other thing is our jobs have more, again, if you’re doing a hundred jobs at a certain margin, you have money to do things that don’t nickel and dime your client or with a homeowner, if you’re competing with three other companies, you have to be real competitive. You can’t go back on a Saturday for free because you have to pay your tech, you have to pay your truck, you have to pay your insurance, and you only made 60% margin on a $700 job. That doesn’t leave you any room to wiggle, where we have a lot of wiggle room. 


Adam (05:45):
Would you say that most of your clients wouldn’t want to hire a primarily residential company?


Bobby (05:53):
We love this conversation, right? So most home service companies are small. If you reach a million dollars in sales, you’re one of very few in your market, so congratulations, you’ve done a lot. If you reach a hundred employees, you’re less than 1% of all companies in the world. So just know that in your world, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is, you’re doing a lot. So to answer that question, whenever you’re dealing with a builder or a commercial client, there’s reputational risk for the decision maker. So either the PM or the purchasing manager and PM would be project manager or purchasing manager or facilities director. And so they have to make sure that whoever they hire checks these boxes. If you are an independent garage door guy and it’s just you don’t have a brand, you don’t have a truck, you don’t have a reputation, they simply, it’s too much risk for them to hire you.


(06:48):
You may be very nice, you may be affordable, but if something goes wrong and their boss goes, Hey, why did you hire Billy’s garage door? I can’t find them. I don’t see that they’re registered with the state. I don’t see general liability. I don’t see an umbrella policy. And so I would say that what they’re looking for is more of a business because it’s more of a business transaction than it’s like, oh no, I can’t get out of my garage. I’m emotional about that. Whereas a business, a custom builder, or a developer, it’s like it’s a line item. It’s one of 700 line items on a house. That’s all it is. And for us, that works because we just do what we say when we say we’re going to do it.


Adam (07:30):
And that’s worked. My perspective on commercial has always been, and correct me if you think I’m wrong, is that your main client is the project manager to make them look good for choosing a good company. If he hires a dud, it makes ’em look bad in front of all his bosses and everybody else. It really doesn’t look good for him. So, how do you balance having branded vehicles and a beautiful website, all these different things that are generally more geared towards residential, but you still want to boost that brand? You want to make that guy look good. And like you said, if the boss looks around and can’t find this company online, that’s not a good place to start.


Bobby (08:04):
Right. Well, and I would say too is our $2 million for business and commercial, it’s not as much money as somebody else’s 2 million that just services homeowners. So I want to say very clearly, we love homeowners. That is a side of the business that we want to get to, but it costs more money to get it, and you have to spend it every time. There’s not a lot of recurring revenue for garage doors with homeowners.


(08:27):
So yeah, we want that line of business. And the reason we do it, I can’t tell you how many people call us and they’re like, I liked your name. I liked the name Doorvana. It’s in our reviews. People are like, Hey, they were nice. I love the name. That’s cool. So it was one of those things that it just kind of stuck and it made sense. And our goals are to manufacture more doors, have more locations, and so we want the brand to be elevated. And we actually have spent probably as much marketing money on building out our website as anything. And what you find is a builders like they don’t have to ask us what we do or what we offer. We have every commercial project, every commercial product that we offer on the site, but that we also have every residential product. So if you’re a homeowner, don’t look at the commercial products. If you’re a commercial building or you’re a custom home builder, you can see that we can do everything. And so we think it’s important. We think that quick access to information is valuable. Our next step is to put pricing on the site for every product that we service.


(09:34):
So there’s kind of an evolution to what we want to do to make it easier for homeowners, because most homeowners spend more time researching a company, where I think a builder or commercial property, they’re like, Hey, these people look good. I’m calling. It’s not like they’re not going down this rabbit hole, where I think with homeowners, because there’s so much risk, this is my home, I need to call three, four companies, where the other guy’s like, Hey, can you be here in two hours? I got a problem. Can you fix it? So just different, just different. And our guys in the field, we have to tell them too, this happens a lot. We’ll get a service request, we’ll go out. And that job was initially done by a custom home builder, but there’s a homeowner in it who’s paying for it? Is it under warranty from the home builder, or is it under warranty from, or does the homeowner pay? Can we offer upgrades because we’re going to say, Hey, the builder that built your home, they put in contractor-grade products. Would you like to upgrade? Well, no, I just moved into an 800,000 house. Why would I want a new opener?


(10:41):
So there is a risk associated with an overlap between who’s the homeowner who paid for it. And so those are just little nuances we have to address that you typically don’t in traditional retail home services.


Adam (10:54):
Let’s talk about getting commercial clients. I think this is something that you’re pretty good at. This has been one of your primary roles in your company for the last couple of years, is being in sales essentially. And so reaching out, cold calling, getting people on the phone, getting managers, PMs, to potentially maybe switch from their old vendor for garage doors to you guys. Let’s walk our listeners through that, because I think a lot of our listeners, I think our listeners lean towards residential, but there’s a lot of listeners out there wanting to get into commercial. They don’t really know how to, so how would you advise ’em to break in? How did you do it?


Bobby (11:27):
Yeah, so your phone is your best friend. You can make millions of dollars a year by just calling and answering your phone. In the business side of things, custom home builders, commercial properties typically they’re showing who they are. Hey, this is Bill’s Custom Homes. My name’s Bill O’Neill. My phone number is this, my email is this. In every scenario, they already have a guy or a girl doing the work. 


(11:52):
So if you ask for too much too soon, they don’t need you right now because if they needed you, they would be out looking for you. But think about a builder. They’re managing 70 to 80 trades on a house, or their project managers are, so they don’t have that much time. But if you catch ’em at the right time, they’ll always give you an opportunity because have you ever heard someone say, man, lemme tell you how much I love my garage door people. He’s just the nicest guy. I love him. I want to give him more business. No, because they’re busy and they don’t care about you. They don’t care about your business. They care about you doing work for them in a good way. So I think if you just pick up the phone and call, introduce yourself, let ’em know that you service their area, and if they ever want somebody else to look at a job, you’d be happy to.


(12:40):
The other side of that is we joined a builders buying group, which is a group of custom home builders that they go in together, create an association, and that gives them buying power with brands. So James Hardy Anderson, Windows Sierra Pacific, this group gets discounts and rebates on those products. It’s nationwide. We joined in North Texas, two different chapters, and all we do is call. We say, Hey, we’re part of the same association. So look for commonalities. If you’re a pest control company or if you’re a landscaping company, look at the builder’s associations. Look at whatever the local chamber of commerce is. All of these companies follow the same playbook. So it’s a popularity contest. And so I need to be on the chamber. I need to be on the BBB, I need to be on Angi’s, or whatever it is. So you can find these companies. It really just depends on do you want to.


(13:33):
And our approach, my partner and I, is that we can get where we want if we do the things nobody else is willing to do. So what’s the thing that nobody wants to do? Nobody wants to pick up a phone call a guy or girl they’ve never met and introduced themselves. We’ve all been to networking events. Everybody’s in a corner. Unless you’re there with your people, it’s human nature. There’s risk associated with rejection. So I don’t want to be rejected, but to me it’s like my conversation is very simple. I just ask who they are, let them know how we’re connected, let ’em know what we do, and then just ask if I can send them something. Can I send you a link to our website to see our jobs? That’s it. Because if you ask for too much too soon, you have no rapport. Imagine going to a homeowner and being nice to meet you. Do you want to buy this thing? It’s say, well, I don’t know. Yeah, exactly. So there’s a lot of that. It’s just being self-aware, but also just the pursuit and taking action.


Adam (14:29):
If someone says, yeah, send me a bid, is that generally a good thing, or are they just try and get rid of you, and once you send the bid, they’ll never respond? Do you get much of that, or most of the time, people are pretty frank about whether or not they’re interested? I’m curious what the next happens next.


Bobby (14:45):
So typically, if we get the opportunity to bid a job, we’ll win at about half the time. And that’s the half that views the quote. Jobber is great because it lets you know of the quotes that get delivered, how many of them are seen. And so that was a blind spot for us. We didn’t realize people weren’t seeing our quotes. So I think what it does is it opens the door for more conversation. It’s just like a marriage. It’s just like dating. You’re not going to get married after the first date. And so it’s not uncommon for a new builder to take a month, two months, I like your price, but can you do this? What’s your price on this other thing? A lot of custom builders will build houses at different price points. So the initial price point has a base level door. Let’s say the medium price point has a medium door, and then the premium product has a premium door, and they’ll start with the least expensive thing, to just kind of see where you are. And then they’ll say, we’ll bid this one and then bid this one. And then it’s like, well, do you have insurance? Yes. Can you sign our vendor packet? And so it can take a month or two to get on board, but if they never send you a bid, you don’t have a chance.


Adam (15:52):
Do you ever ask, What do you like about your current vendor? What do you dislike, like competitor chronic questions, or do you just avoid them?


Bobby (16:02):
I really don’t. And that may be a missed opportunity, a blind spot for me, because I know they have someone because they’re building homes today. Not to mention, we go to job sites every time we’re doing a job. Our guys will drive around job sites, take pictures of builder signs, and take pictures of the inside of the garage doors to see who’s installing them. So I already know in a lot of instances who they’re using, and I know them already. So it might be helpful to ask a question you already know the answer to, because then you can prep the next couple of questions. But typically, we avoid talking about anybody else because it’s just us. Really, what you’re getting is us and our commitment to you. And I don’t want to belittle anyone or say anything bad. I don’t know these other guys. There are a few companies where we are that are way bigger than us, and so who am I to say that we are right and they’re wrong? It could be the opposite.


Adam (16:56):
Yeah, this was a big thing for you. Without some of these commercial clients, you wouldn’t have grown as fast as you did. And so at one point, you made a $500,000 phone call, you just didn’t know which phone call it was, sort of thing. You called somebody eventually who turned into a lot of business for you over time. What matters most to these contractor guys? Is it speed? Is it price? Is it convenient? What are the things? Because they are different motivations than homeowners.


Bobby (17:21):
Yeah. So, one thing that’s interesting about this business, too, is the serendipity of it all. So people that work in the builder industry, they stay in that industry. So it’s not uncommon for someone that worked at a production company that was a builder that managed 30 or 40 homes. They leave that job in, where are they going to go work? Another production builder, a better production builder, a custom home builder, or they’ll start their own business. And if we were good to them, what are they going to do? They’re going to call us and say, Hey, I left company A. I’m now at company B. That’s how we landed. Our next production builder was a guy that he managed 40 or 50 homes for a production builder. It didn’t work out. He left and goes, Hey, I think you guys are great. I think you’d be an improvement on who we have.


(18:08):
So there’s that’s why the next job is always in the current job. If we neglect a relationship and then that person leaves, we’ve lost the opportunity. So I think the biggest thing that they want is just someone that does what they say. It’s really pretty simple. So if you’re late, tell ’em you’re going to be late. If you messed up, Hey, I messed up. If you didn’t place the order when they needed you to, Hey, I didn’t place the order when you needed me to. That’s a big one. It’s my mistake. And I think so many times we want to talk, Hey, there’s a problem. And the first thing you start to do is you justify it. You’re like, well, the guy in the field, he was, he didn’t know. He didn’t tell me. We just are like, absolutely, we’ll fix it. Let me get back to you and let you know when we can fix it. Because a production builder that has maybe its 20 homes, they’re dealing with 20 homes with lots of problems with all the trades. Production builders have their own set of problems. And so if you’re having to manage the garage door guy, the cabinet guy, the concrete coating guy, all the guys.


(19:23):
If you become a problem for them, they’re going to associate you with negativity and not doing what you say. So that’s really the number one rule in my business partner. I think that’s his life. That’s one thing I had to say about him. He’s always going to do what he said he is going to do when he said he is going to do it. And that’s been an inspiration for me because I come from marketing and service, and sales where I want to please and try to justify. So he’s really taught me to just like, we screwed up. We’ll fix it, but let me get back to you on when we can fix it.


Adam (19:54):
Yeah. I think all business comes down to keeping promises. But I do think in commercial, I’ve used this phrase a lot when I’m trying to get commercial clients. What I heard a lot in the past was I had to keep calling my vendor. I had to keep making sure. And I finally coined the phrase, you have to just babysit ’em all the time,


Bobby (20:14):
Right?


Adam (20:15):
Yes. I’m tired of babysitting my vendors. So that was the word I used from that. I was like, that’s good. Are you tired of babysitting your vendors? Yeah, you don’t have to babysit us.


Bobby (20:23):
Use that in the cold email. 


Adam (20:25):
Then you have to actually have to follow through and make sure that they don’t have to babysit you.


Bobby (20:29):
And what we realized, too, is you’re going to get one chance. So we have a really nice custom home builder in North Texas that builds properties that aren’t Architectural Digest, if you know what that is. It’s just a fancy magazine with people’s houses. But they’ve built homes that are featured in that magazine. So we bid five jobs for them. They gave us one, and we know what that means. And we know the job sites are progressing. They’re all in the same area. So we see them. We know that they’re waiting to decide if we are for those or not. And so you really get, you can blow it. Absolutely. You can blow it. And that’s where we have probably done a disservice by not bringing on a project manager or a salesperson. We probably could have, we probably should have. I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it the way that we did, but for us, it’s like that’s precious.


(21:18):
Literally, if they call me right now, I’ll stop the interview. I’ll go outside and I’ll do it. They need it because I don’t have my phone on me, so I can’t do that. But it’s one of those things where it’s like it matters more to me, and nobody else is going to care that much. And it’s not their fault. They shouldn’t care. If I hire a sales manager or a project manager that’s a commission-based rep, he gets a salary, but he doesn’t have any equity. Is he going to care if he’s at dinner with his kids at seven o’clock and they call, is he going to answer? I wouldn’t want him to, because shame on me for putting him in that position. I’ll take that call because my wife and my kids understand who I am and what we’re trying to build. And that’s just different. And so I think, again, it’s just our approach to those sorts of relationships is you’re going to get one shot. Let’s make sure the one shot goes as well as it can.


Adam (22:08):
Talking about getting shot. So a lot of residential companies are spending money on marketing spend and they’re doing ads and they’re trying to drum up all these leads because, one, every day it starts over. You have to get new work, new work every day, new work, new work every day, new clients, very little repeat clients. Well, with residential doors. But anyway, with commercial, the lifetime value of a commercial client is infinite, really, because they’re always building new projects and that’s their whole game. And so is it possible to get commercial clients from marketing, or is it really just all cold calling relational building? Did you do any of that stuff in the beginning?


Bobby (22:46):
Yeah, so it’s a great question. And we have run paid search campaigns on and off kind of in fits and starts, depending on our cash flow. If we have excess reserves, we’ll go ahead and put out a residential-targeted campaign.


Adam (22:59):
For residential, though. For residential, though, right


Bobby (23:01):
Right. So what we found in running commercial ads, so by direct timely service, building your next home, what we found was that the clients or the prospects that called are not clients that we want. So I don’t want a general contractor that does one garage door a year, and he needs it today for $700. He’s in a bind. And so what we found was that whenever we ran those ads, it was really somebody that was in a bind. And it’s not that we didn’t want to help them. It’s not that there’s an opportunity, but it’s just our business model is like, it’s not that, right? We don’t want you to come pick up a door from us and have your carpenter install it. You need it done cheaply. We just want to do it a certain way. Now, one thing that has been really good is we take all of the products that we offer and we put them in Google Business Profile as a product. So if somebody is searching for a specific product and nobody in the area has it, but we do on our website and on our Google Business Profile, well, we’ll get an opportunity for that person to see us. In our website conversion rate, it’s less than 2%. So for every hundred people, we might get one and a half calls. And so what we just try to do is continue to ratchet up that visitor count so that serendipitously we just get more in.


(24:24):
But we have not run any campaigns for commercial or builder businesses. Typically, it’s just targeted to homeowners. And that’s expensive. And we’ve had mixed success.


Adam (24:36):
Yeah, it’s totally different too.


Bobby (24:37):
Yeah. Well, and I come from that. So I spent a decade in a home service business that was geared just to homeowners. And so it’s doable, it’s achievable, whether it’s SEO or paid search, but it’s just expensive. And right now, our cash, one thing about production builders, and we spoke about this, I was talking to a landscaper that does commercial work, and she’s like, we have clients that don’t pay for 90 days.


Adam (25:03):
It’s a long time.


Bobby (25:04):
It’s a long time. And so that’s the other side of going towards businesses and commercial properties, is that as a business owner, you might have to wait a while.


Adam (25:14):
Bobby, this is a great conversation. I want to pause for a minute to talk about Jobber and why we like Jobber so much. From your perspective, being a two million-plus business, have you found that Jobber can definitely handle that size, volume business?


Bobby (25:27):
Yeah, so I think we’ve started with Jobber back two years ago, three years ago. And from the bottom to where we are today, it’s been great. It has a company feature associated with it. And for us, a lot of our business, they’re builders or other businesses. And so what’s nice is that when you click that button, it kind of takes off the financing options that are integrated into it. And so we’re big fans. And then the parent-child relationship, which deals with how you can have one account in lots of properties, that’s really valuable for us. And we looked at some other services that just didn’t fit the bill for us. So we don’t anticipate leaving Jobber for some time, especially with the product development that they have ongoing and are continuing to roll out. I think it’s a really complete suite of tools for a home service company or really any service company.


Adam (26:17):
Yeah, I agree. I think Jobber is just the right size for just about any business within the range I’m ever going to be. So it handles everything I need, more, which I love.


Bobby (26:28):
Well, and the thing I like to think about, how do you look at that investment? We look at that investment as an employee that has a brain that’s bigger than all of us, and that has all of the information at all times. And so you can find a way if you’re just starting, you can a way to justify that investment. It’ll pay for itself in no time.


Adam (26:47):
100%. I love it, it’s a brain. It’s a brain that’s bigger than mine and all my team together. So if you need a digital brain for your business, you need Jobber. You can go to Jobber.com/podcast deal, get an exclusive discount for new users, and start building your business bigger and better with Jobber. 
(27:05)
What about pricing? Because I know that if you don’t dial your pricing, you’re just a sitting duck, right? So you, from day one, were your prices too low, you had to increase ’em? Were they too high then you bring ’em back? How did you make sure that your pricing got you to that 2 million?


Bobby (27:20):
I don’t know that I have a really good answer. I think what we did was we stabilized our pricing and we said, we’re not going to sell anything for less than this, no matter what. So we kind of had a floor, and then the ceiling was really based on volume and product types. So one thing that we’re cognizant of is that we don’t live in a vacuum. We make two types of doors, an MDO and LP smart trim composite door, and a wood door of all varying species. But if a custom builder wants a glass door, they could get that glass door from 50 people. So there are certain products where we’ll make less money because we want them to know that we’re competitive on that product. So our pricing, it’s really, it fluctuates, but we have a floor, unless the client’s big enough, we’ll blow right through the floor. If you come to us with 200 homes over two years, you can kind of tell us what you need, and we’ll do it right, as long as it’s not going to put us out of business.


Adam (28:15):
Well, let’s talk about that. So let’s pretend you’re trying to get this new PM and he does high volume. He really wants this. It’s a big fish. But he starts to put a little pressure on, like, well, can you give me this price? And he starts to negotiate. I think most people would agree, let’s not negotiate with homeowners. It’s just not a good game to play, but it is a different world. I’m curious what your thoughts are on negotiating with commercial clients.


Bobby (28:42):
What we try to do is, if price is a concern, we have room to wiggle. But what we’ll ask for are different payment terms. So like, oh, you need 8% off. Great. We need a deposit. We’re happy to meet the price, but we need terms. Because what ends up happening is if the relationship starts that way, the downward pressure is not going to stop. Right?


(29:07):
And so often the other trades get more expensive, so then all of a sudden they have to try to shave dollars. And garage doors are a place where you can pick up a phone call, call a guy that works out of his truck that has no office, no manufacturing facility, no manufacturing staff, and say, Hey, I need this done for this price. And they’ll go, oh, yeah, I can do that.


(29:29):
And so part of it is just realizing that we don’t have all the answers. We are not a silver bullet, but we’ll do everything that we can to earn and keep the business. And it’s challenging too, because what you don’t to do with us is babysit, right? The guy that you pay 70% of what you paid us, do you think he’s going to respond to you quickly? You just beat him down. You made it where he didn’t make any money. Now you want him to come service you when you’re in need.


(29:56):
It’s counterproductive to beat people down on price, because if you’re building a certain level of home, you really should care about quality the value. You have to figure out how to do that as a home builder and building your home and marketing it, and your positioning. If you beat down every trade, reputations carry, and they follow. So it’s very often where we’ll have an opportunity to work with someone. We’ll call another builder and say, Hey, what do you know about this builder? And they’re like, I’ve heard there’s a lot of turnover in trades because of payment, or I’ve heard that X is the expectation, but Y is the reality. So it’s just doing your due diligence.


Adam (30:36):
I think I have some reference checking on some of your, I like what you said earlier about when they ask you, when they start negotiating, they ask you for a change of price, you change the service. I love that. Because if they say, Can I get 8% off? Yeah, sure. As long as you say yes. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why didn’t you make 8% less before I asked you your best price? But you say, sure, but I have to change my agreement. Now I need to deposit. Or maybe this warranty goes from five years to two years, whatever the case may be. But I would urge our listeners, if you’re going to negotiate and change the price, you’ve got to change the product or service. Otherwise, you look pleas-y.


Bobby (31:14):
Absolutely. And we tell people this. We talk to prospective clients where they come to us because of our, I don’t want to say prowess, but because they’ve heard good things about our wood door products, and they’re like, well, can you do a still door? And they’re like, oh, your still door is real expensive. And we’re like, compared to what? What’s it compared to?


(31:33):
So it’s compared to the guy that you were using that doesn’t run an operation. This is the biggest thing too, is most businesses in our industry go out of business within five years. Most of them go out of business within five years. So his inability, the competition’s inability to price, isn’t a reflection of us. It’s a reflection of them. And so we try not to be beholden to that. But again, someone wants a concession. Sure, but we need this. I like that. And we just ask. And it doesn’t always happen, but if people want what they want, they’ll concede.


Adam (32:12):
Bobby, this has been great. I love talking about the commercial side of things. I’m going to boil it down to three actionable items here for our listeners. Number one is be the solution. Don’t be hassle. Don’t be friction. Don’t make your vendors babysit. You want to deliver on your promises that you make to the PMs that you’re trying to attract and all that kind of stuff. Number two is don’t underestimate the name and the branding of your business. It really matters what you call yourself. Bobby said that people really liked the name Doorvana, and that really worked for him. So you need to make sure your name is compelling and attractive. Number three is, if you lower your price, you must change your service offering. Hey, Adam, can I get 5% off? Sure. But now our warranty just went from two years to one year. Otherwise, you come across as sleazy for just matching their price out of nowhere. Make sure you change your service offering. Bobby, that was great. How do people find out more about you?


Bobby (33:04):
Yeah, our company is doorvanca.com, and on social media, we were lucky enough to get Doorvana for all of the handles. So you can find us there. And if you’re in North Texas or Austin, Texas, and you need a garage door service, give us a call. We would love to help.


Adam (33:20):
Well, that was really insightful. Thanks for being here, Bobby.


Bobby (33:21):
Yeah, thank you, Adam. Appreciate it.


Adam (33:23):
And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will help you attract more commercial clients and grow your business. As always, I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me @adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best. So go give it to ’em.