Latest / The Elevator Careers Podcast / 33 Years in the Elevator Industry: Become a Student of the Game | Bill Appelbaum

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33 Years in the Elevator Industry: Become a Student of the Game | Bill Appelbaum · The Elevator Careers Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_05: My high school wrestling coach told us one time early on, become a student of the game.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, that meant going out, scouting other teams, going to clinics, going to see other college teams.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_05: See, everybody does things differently, you know, and try to go out and get a more global perspective of things.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_05: So I've tried to apply that to a lot of different things.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_05: I applied it to elevators early on.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred Group.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Matt Allred.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: In this podcast, we talk to the people whose lives and careers are dedicated to the vertical transportation industry to inform and share lessons learned, building upon the foundation of those who have gone before, to inspire the next generation of elevator careers.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Today our guest is Bill Applebaum with LCD Elevator.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Bill started in the industry as a truck driver in Washington, D.C.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: in 1990.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Over his 33 years, Bill has served in a variety of roles, including sales, operations, management, and as vice president.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bill has enjoyed a varied career and has now happily returned to his primary passion of modernization sales and project management.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Bill, welcome to the show.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Matt.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_05: Glad to be here.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_05: Appreciate it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: You bet.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to be able to talk more.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know we've been chatting off and on for, I don't know, 10 or 12 years, it seems like it's been a while.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um excited to just get to know you a little bit better and talk more about your career.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I always love to start with a question of how did you get into the elevator industry?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_05: I was uh I was 19 years old and I was dating a girl that I later married, and her father one Sunday night called us to the dinner table and told me I was starting as a truck driver the following Monday.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, I'll be here.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_05: And it was in uh it was in Washington, DC, uh, with Amtec, reliable at the time, later became Amtec Elevator Services.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_05: And I started there uh driving a truck, 19 years old, delivering parts, uh sweeping the warehouse, shipping, receiving, all those good things that happen on the back end, and uh really learned the business from the backside in.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me just a little bit about your father-in-law, Bill.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Joe DeMeo is a uh career professional elevator sales guy.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_05: Uh still selling today.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_05: He he's selling for Kencore and uh just loves it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_05: He did over 50 years in the industry.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Otis, General, Amtec, General, Tisson.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and now and now with Kencore and still going going strong.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_05: He goes into the office, I think, a few days a week, and um just doesn't want to retire, but because he loves working and loves the industry that much.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he was able to to I guess have enough sway to say, hey, hire this kid, put him in a truck and see if he can make it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly right.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_05: And then and do the same thing when I got into sales, pretty much the same same routine.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_05: Take a chance on this kid, put him in sales, see and see if he makes it.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_05: And uh here I am.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Did did you know he was looking for a job for you?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or or did No, I didn't.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_05: I didn't.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think it surprised you.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know how a job.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_05: I was there for a visit.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_05: I was there for a visit.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_05: They had moved down a few months prior, and uh, I was just down there for the weekend, and that's how he closed out the weekend Sunday night with that notification.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_05: I knew he was in the elevator industry, I didn't know what he did.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh sure.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_05: I knew he was in sales and then got promoted to management, but I really didn't know uh anything about the industry until I showed up the first day.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_05: And uh my first task was stripping an old Otis controller that was sitting in the warehouse that was being modernized.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_05: They they ripped out the controller, old relay logic, copper's carbons, and um I was told to take it apart and organize the parts.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_05: So that's what I did.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_05: For about maybe a day, day and a half, and then I don't know if that was an initiation test or what, but I went at it until someone told me to stop.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_05: And then I had to go and deliver some parts to a mechanic in uh downtown DC.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_05: Really uh rolling into DC was was an incredible sight.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_05: Just I had been there before, but just you know, driving through there with the buildings, the majesty of the of the buildings, the Capitol building, just so white, it was whiter than I ever remembered.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: It was pretty cool.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and then I I got to the building, I found the mechanic, had the little box of parts, and he said to me, Do you want to see where these go?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_05: I'm like, Yeah, yeah, that's that's cool.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_05: See where they are.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_05: So it was it was a bag of uh door lock contacts, and the mechanic took me to the elevator, opened the door, and showed me exactly where they went and how that whole thing worked, and this is connected to that.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_05: I was hooked.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_05: I was hooked right there.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna ask you that, you know, at what point did it kind of click for you that that this is this is the place?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that was it.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_05: You know, out there, out there with the guys, you know, the the maintenance guys all became became friends and resources.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, I I'd have I got thrown into uh the inventory not manager, I was doing it temporarily.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_05: Uh our inventory manager went out for surgery.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_05: So it was on me.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_05: I had the warehouse and parts.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And how long had you been there when when they said, hey, you're in you're now in charge of the warehouse?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_05: I bet he was I was there probably two months.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I started September 19th, 1990.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_05: I want to say mid-November.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_05: He was he was out for surgery, or maybe December, but uh now I'm now I'm at the helm, you know.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_05: And um right.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_05: I'd have I'd have mechanics call me, and this one guy would call me up and say, hey, take out your your Adams book.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_05: All right, let me find the Adams book, flip through it, and I'll go to go to the copper contacts, carbons, whatever it was, relays.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_05: Uh he would tell me exactly where it was in the book, what I'm looking for, and uh, you know, sometimes I didn't find exactly what he wanted, but I got close and sometimes I was wrong and we had to go to another source.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_05: But uh there were a lot of guys that helped me out.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it sounds like it.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean I was yeah, it was interesting.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was honestly expecting when you first said you started brand new and delivering these parts that that maybe there would be some some pushback, like who is this kid and why is he here, you know?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and but it sounds like they just kind of sucked you in and said, Hey, you're one of us, let me show you.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, there was there was some some of that, you know.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_05: You're this young kid that came down from Philadelphia and now you're in DC.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: Like, who are you?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_05: Who you related to?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_05: You know, everybody always they always wanted to know how'd you get the job?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_05: You gotta be related.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_05: So yeah, I we went through that too, but for the most part, uh everybody was was helpful and a lot of a lot of good guys down there in DC.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So how long did you do the the warehouse management?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: How long was he gone for?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_05: That uh did that for Amtec for about two years, and it was in DC and Baltimore, and then uh for some reasons close to home, I needed to get close to home.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_05: So I I got a job at Montgomery Elevator, it was still Montgomery back then.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_05: They had bought suburban elevator in King of Prussia outside of Philly, and I worked there for about two and a half years or so in a similar role, but a little bit bigger, because Montgomery was doing a lot of new construction in Philly, 90, 92, 93, 94 were big, big construction years in Philly, and Montgomery had a big share of that work.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_05: So it was it was bigger equipment, uh, bigger jobs, bigger office, big warehouse.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_05: And um and I managed that for for about three years as well.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_05: And then I I got into sales, I got my first shot at sales, right?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_05: Back back to Amtech, okay.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_05: Uh hired as a sales trainee for about four hours, and then I was a sales rep.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Four hours.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's impressive.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_05: That may be an exaggeration, but it was a quick, it was a quick training program.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_05: As soon as the first customer called with an issue, and I'm looking around for who's gonna handle this and realized it was me.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was you.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_05: Training training was over.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at least you knew the parts, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you'd been at it three or four, what is it, four or five years?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, about five years in at that point, yes.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's a pretty good uh start.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would I would think at least to to just having having spent that time in the in the warehouse.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see yourself going into sales?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, was that something you were pursuing, or was it I you know I I didn't um I hadn't really thought about it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_05: It was it was a little intimidating to me.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_05: And um I think that kept me from actively pursuing it.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I I had some some other sales jobs along the way, you know, working part-time here and there.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_05: And sure, you know, I so I guess I warmed up to it.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_05: But once I once I started back at Amtech and um went out and met my first customer, a couple of customers, uh, just tried to work through the problems and realized that I knew more than they did, but I was here to help them.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_05: It got it got easier.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_05: It was oh yeah, yeah.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_05: You know, and even even cold calling, you know, it you put an expectation, and I I tried to teach this to a lot of the sales reps that worked for me later, that uh that expectation of a first visit of a cold call, just won't expect anything.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_05: What are you gonna do?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_05: Just go in, leave your card and be memorable, right?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_05: Because the the first time, next time, maybe the tenth time, they're fed up with their elevator company and they have an issue, then they're gonna look for your card.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_05: I remember that guy came in here a couple of months ago, year ago, what have you, right?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_05: And they'll find you, and that that's what happens, and then networking, the golf outings, uh BOMA, IFMA, these organizations, just be out there and be visible.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_05: Uh again, not trying to sell anybody on the on the first first meeting, but once once they have a need and you've already created rapport with them, it may be three months, it may be a year, maybe three years.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_05: But you know, it's a long, it's a long sales cycle sometimes.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_05: It's a long career, and uh, and things, things take time.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: So were you mostly on the service repair side initially then?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_05: I initially service service and repair, yeah.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_05: And then um I got into modernization.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_05: At at Amtec, we handled, we had a territory, so we handled everything in that territory.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, yeah.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_05: I had New Jersey to start uh so there wasn't there weren't huge modernizations at that time, but a few months in I was able to to handle a modernization, and and we had a great, great mod team at uh at Amtech.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Jim Freeman Sr.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_05: led that for the for the whole country.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_05: And we happened to have him.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_05: He was from New Jersey, so we had the luxury of having him in our office.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_05: So I was you know next to the national mod director.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_05: I stayed next to him as often as I could and to try to learn as much as I could.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_05: And uh he helped me a great deal uh as I was young and working on various size projects and then eventually on some huge projects, right?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_05: But um, you know, having him there definitely helped me develop in modernization and just that whole process of of taking the old elevator and doing doing what it needs to become new again was um and every job is different.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_05: Every job is different.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: You can't just look at it as a true cookie cutter project, um, you know, and learning what to look for, what's gonna affect us?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_05: Why do we need to look at this?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_05: You know, there's 10 different things that are affected by that that one item.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_05: You gotta get every measurement, right?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_05: You gotta get all the information.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, so um from service to mod, I mean, w which of the I guess niches within within sales is kind of your favorite?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Where did you really feel like you thrived the most?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_05: I I was successful in in service sales, but really modernization is my that's my favorite by far.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_05: And now I'm I'm doing it full time again.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_05: So I've I've come full circle and I've been a lot of places in between, but but now I'm at L C D elevator, uh great independent company, owned three owners, all about my age, and uh great people to work with.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and I'm selling and project managing modernization.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nice, nice.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you and and you mentioned, you know, a couple uh companies that have that have sold that you know that you had worked for.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: You'd worked for, you know, obviously Montgomery had sold to Koney and and uh Amtec to Otis.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So how did consolidation affect you and your career?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean you were like right in the middle of it, it sounds like.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and um well amtec in Pittsburgh was uh was a branch that I started with Mark Freeman and Tom La Martina.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Mark sent me out there, I think his first day as the branch manager in uh in New Jersey.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: So there was nothing there, and you just he just said, Hey, go here and start a start new branch.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_05: Nothing.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we we ended up bidding on a large federal project, and it was the same same project team for GSA that was out of Philadelphia that Amtec had done okay, huge project with a couple of years prior.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_05: Now they were doing a job in Pittsburgh.
• 15:41
  unknown: Okay.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_05: So Mark put me in charge of that.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_05: So that was really my first my first time being in Pittsburgh was there for a pre-bid meeting the morning after I was told to be there.
• 15:52
  unknown: Right.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_05: Flew out that night and uh fell in love with the city.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_05: My first time through the tunnel, I fell in love with it and uh worked on that project for about six months.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_05: We were eventually awarded the job, and now we had something to start with.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_05: So I started cold calling networking for probably two years, probably two years, uh knocked on every single door.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_05: I would just go block by block office, highlight all the buildings that I stopped in, catalog everything, get get my my CRM built, and um start networking.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_05: Uh again, the golf outings, the BOMA functions, any any type of organization I could find.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_05: And we we went, it was basically three of us.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_05: It was me, Mark, and Tom, right, and and started going at every function we could.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_05: And lo and behold, two years later, we started knocking down contracts, big contract, MC Park, USX Tower, big, big projects, and we built a nice business uh in the course of about two and a half to three years, and then Amtech sold their Cincinnati office, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_05: And it was the first time that I'd been involved with just one branch being sold off, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_05: And I I was a little bit involved in it being in Pittsburgh.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Tom was the vice president and he ran Cincinnati as well.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_05: So I helped him out uh going out, meeting meeting some customers, trying to collect some old money, uh, trying to clean up some some issues, and then transitioning, transitioning the modernization contracts to uh the Otis team.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_05: So once that was once that was happening, I started looking at Pittsburgh as you know a very low overhead office.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_05: We had a handful of huge projects, uh, huge maintenance contracts.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_05: We had the one big modernization going, a couple smaller ones.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_05: And I thought maybe Pittsburgh could be the next one sold off.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, I I went out there, I moved out there, physically moved out there.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_05: Family went and um did that for that opportunity to start the office and run the office that I had started.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_05: And then, you know, I just kind of saw the writing on the wall and thought maybe this is gonna go away if if we get bought by Otis, then I'll be a sales rep again or what have you.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_05: Um, and I at that point in my career, I just I won't I wanted more.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_05: I had invested years of a solid year of living in a hotel and commuting back and forth from Philly.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_05: So I I had a lot invested in that and I wanted to succeed and and run it as a manager.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_05: I I really didn't think that was gonna happen for the long haul.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_05: So uh by that time, there was a there was kind of a shift from Amtec to Tyson of personnel.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I just wanted, yeah, because I yeah, so my my friends from Amtech had gone over to Tyson, so I had a home pretty quick, and uh I was hired over at um over at Tyson Pittsburgh.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So staying staying in in uh Pittsburgh, I think, but uh but just different company.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Gotcha.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_05: Instead of driving into the city, I drove five miles up the street.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_05: And Pittsburgh was was great.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_05: I I love the city, I still do.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_05: I visit there a couple of times a year.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_05: Uh one of my best friends is still out there, uh Dave Colich, who I met at Tiston.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_05: Uh he was he was the super salesman out there.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_05: He built that office brick by brick, contract by contract.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, a key guy for me.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, being again being new guy there, and I was probably 28 at the time.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, I I leaned on him and he made that transition very easy for me.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_05: My first, really my first uh endeavor into branch management was was there in the small Pittsburgh office.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I've I've been told that uh I think I think Pittsburgh is a Schindler town, I guess because of the Westinghouse that was based there.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: So you had to kind of wrestle away those uh those bids.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_05: We did.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_05: We did.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_05: It was fun.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_05: It was fun.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_05: Uh you know, they a lot of the a lot of the contracts we had at Amtec were former Schindler contracts.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: So so moved to uh to TK there in um and and you were like say branch manager there in in Pittsburgh for a while?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, not not as long as I would have liked.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_05: I would have liked to have stayed there a while longer, but uh there was some again some reorganization, some personnel changes, and I got recruited back to Philadelphia where okay.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_05: Well, maybe wasn't even recruited.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: I got told two orders reassigned.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Was it uh was it a promotion or was it just uh transfer?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, yeah, it was a promotion.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_05: Uh the Pittsburgh office was maybe six million a year, maybe eight on a good year.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_05: Uh and Philly, King of Prussia was thirty million, thirty-two million.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_05: So it yeah, it was a promotion.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_05: Uh but it was it was a much tougher, tougher assignment, especially early on.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Go from a small smaller branch to something that big and and not knowing the area.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you had you had kind of built the the Philly operation from from nothing.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that you you got to know a lot of a lot of the people, a lot of the players, and yeah, so stepping into that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: New one I can imagine is a pressure.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, stepping into there.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_05: And it was the Kenya pressure was struggling.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, that Philly office uh was struggling uh profitability-wise, uh really terrible maintenance margins, which had been um had been one of the things that I I thrived with from my from my amtech days.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_05: Prior to prior to going to Pittsburgh, I was I was in sales, but then I was reassigned to operations management.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, I the only operations I had was in the warehouse.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_05: I never worked in the field, but I had I had a couple of key guys working with me that I used to deliver parts to.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_05: And that was a tough transition.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_05: That was a that was one of the key moments in my career, just backing up a little bit.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_05: Um yeah, Mark Freeman and and Jimmy Freeman Jr.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_05: had the idea that they wanted they just wanted a businessman.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_05: That's how they explained it to me.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_05: They wanted a businessman running operations.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_05: It didn't matter that I was in sales and had never been in the field, they wanted a businessman running it.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_05: So that uh that that was an easy sale.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_05: I was resisting at first until they really explained it that way.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_05: And I said, All right, this makes sense.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was one of a different perspective, yeah.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, just make a business decision, not trying to fix everything.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, one of the best lines I ever heard that I carry with me, Eric Lazier, who's at AEG now, he was our president at Amtech.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, and uh you know, he came in, we were struggling in maintenance margins, and he came in and and talked to the group, and he said, you know, our job here is to make money for the company and the shareholders.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_05: Fixing elevators is a fringe benefit.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_05: And that clicked, man, that rang so true.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, I carried that uh to this day, you know.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um our our first responsibility was to make money.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_05: We gotta have the right amount of people with the right amount of material.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_05: We can't buy everything.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_05: Exactly, exactly.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_05: So really between between um that comment and just you know having the mindset of of running it as a business and not really fixing them first, but uh fixing them profitably was was a huge huge uh click for me, huge moment for me.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_05: And um that carried me through operations management, branch management all all the way through.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_05: What was it?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I'm just curious what you know the obviously the philosophy, but how did you how did you implement that?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: What were some things that you started to see that oh okay, we can we can change this?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we started working everything backwards and and working it mathematically.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_05: So if we get we get X amount of dollars per month on our maintenance contracts, how many people can we afford?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_05: Or how much money can we afford?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_05: How do we want to separate that?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_05: How many route mechanics do we want?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_05: We can set it up however however we want, headcount-wise, structure-wise, but we only have X amount to spend.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, we we get 100,000 and we have to make 20,000.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_05: So you get 80,000 to spend.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, how do we want to spend it?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_05: And that was that was something I thought was was pretty uh pretty cool because it was away from the norm of deciding how many elevators are on a route, uh, how many So when I was gonna ask you what it what was the norm?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: What was kind of the thinking that that you stepped into that that just wasn't working?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the old norm would be say to assign a mechanic uh 32 hours a week in maintenance time, okay, based on the number of elevators he has and really a set number of hours per unit per month, whether it's one for a hydro, two for a gear, or for us.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: So whether it's paying you five dollars or five thousand dollars, it it didn't really matter.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was more about units and time.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:28
  unknown: Right.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_05: So we shifted that and we we decided, well, let's see, let's let's load up our routes or let's reorganize our routes.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_05: Um, they hadn't been adjusted in years, and we would say we had uh 20 routes and we'd add a contract and we would just pick a guy to throw it on without right really looking at looking at all the routes.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_05: Well, there's a lot of overlap, and we had a lot of guys crisscrossing, passing each other on the road.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Same building, maybe, and you got you're working on that one, and I'm working on these two.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: That made not make sense.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_05: Just because that's how it's always been.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_05: And I know the I know the superintendent, I know the receptionist, so that's my job.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, that was another thing that we stripped down, and it was painful for those people.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I was gonna say, you probably got all kinds of pushback, right?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean start messing with the status quo.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we that's right.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_05: That's right.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_05: You're messing with people's status quo, their comfort level, their zone money, depending on where the job was.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, sure.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we sat in a room for uh probably three days bringing three or four guys in at a time and going through the same speech.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I think we did a morning and an afternoon session.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_05: We went through the same speech, handed out the new route sheet.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_05: There it there's yours, and give them a couple minutes to flip through it, and here come all the yeah, here come all the complaints, all the objections, all the reasons you guys can't do this.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_05: But we did it.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_05: We we stayed strong and we did it.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_05: Another another kind of way out of the box thing we did was uh Jimmy told me that I have a hundred I have a hundred people in my organization, I can do whatever I want with them.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_05: What do you mean?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we had the University of Pennsylvania contract back then, and we were struggling.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_05: It we had three full-time guys there, but it might have been too much, and it it had gone years with with those that same approach, and whatever these three guys could maintain and fix, that's that's all we had there.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we did, you know, they they get done as much as they can, but um, you know, we've been talking one night about how we can get the job cleaned up and how we can maybe do a blitz of the job.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_05: Oh wow, and that's Jimmy said you got a hundred guys, what can you do with them?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_05: Let's block out three days and get everybody there.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_05: We we took every mechanic we had.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_05: Except for resident mechanics where they had 40 hours dedicated at a building.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_05: We paired out, you know, maybe 10, 10 to 20 guys.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_05: So we had 75 or 80 people at the University of Pennsylvania, and I had flashcards, postcards, you know, uh file cards, index cards with the tasks on them.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_05: You got this building, here's the tasks, and just hand them out.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_05: And we had a home base set up in one of the one of the conference rooms there, and the team would go or the or the mechanic would go, helper would go out, complete their task, come back.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_05: Here's another car.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_05: And um, it was unbelievable what we got done there.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_05: We got done there to try and save that contract.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, we spent we spent a ton of money on that contract, that those two, three days, but again, uh we had this much money to spend in the months, and didn't really matter where the labor was at that point.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_05: So that's kind of a philosophy shift, and that's a that's an extreme example, but uh you know, that type of philosophy helped carry me through to really figure out how to run a service business.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, it sounded like you were you were willing to think outside the box, challenge a status quo, and and I'm I mean you I'm assuming you you did save that contract for at least for a while, and you know, I'm sure it paid for itself to just invest in.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we we saved it for a while.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um, it did become a casualty at the contract later down the road.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but for the time being, we saved it and you know, showed really the the customer and our our all of our employees, including management, that we were willing to take risks and do what it took, you know, not just oh well, this is you know, we got our three guys there.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_05: I guess they'll get to it when they can.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_05: No, we're gonna we're gonna do something different here.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_05: People were skeptical, but once we did it, it was it paid dividends in a lot of different areas.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I imagine just the uh the camaraderie you built that hey guys, we're we're gonna get together, we're gonna tackle this thing that's that's really big.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they probably talked about that for years.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, you remember when?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're in right.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, we we we kind of got to you know move back to Philly and and got the promotion.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: What what was kind of your story from there?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: You had mentioned, you know, you know, as we were talking earlier about a lot of change, a lot of yeah, a lot of you know turbulence or whatever you want to call it.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of turbulence.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_05: Uh the branch wasn't doing well.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_05: And again, you know, we're talking maintenance, maintenance profitability was the biggest there.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_05: And been through some things already.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_05: I learned things, you know.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_05: And I got to use, I got to use Eric's line probably two weeks in there.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_05: Fixing elevators as a fringe benefit.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_05: It's a pretty cool one, but we gotta make money first.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_05: There was a lot of uh, there was a lot of uh disgruntled employees there at the time.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_05: Um there was a bonus structure in place for operations, and the operations team hadn't received the bonus in many, many quarters.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_05: Uh so they were under the impression that corporate or the region was just messing with the bonus plan and they weren't getting so you know, I I went through a couple of meetings where they're like, well, what's what's the sense in doing this if you know we're not gonna get a bonus anyway?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_05: I said, all right, let's let's stop there.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_05: I said, here's the here's the five criteria for the the bonus plan.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_05: Went down.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_05: All right, we need to be at X percent to make the bonus.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_05: Where are we?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_05: And I had everybody with their income statements out.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_05: I don't think they had ever been given an income statement, but they had it now.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_05: And I made them all find the the page and the rubber page, yeah.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_05: So they found it, and I said, okay, does that qualify?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_05: No.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_05: Next criteria.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_05: There were five criteria for profitability and then two for safety.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_05: The safety was good, they had those.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_05: But the five profitability were not there, but going one through five, showing what we needed and where we are, opened their eyes that oh, there is there's a formula here.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're not just getting we're not just getting stabbed in the back by these green people in the ivory tower.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's weird.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's not just they don't like you.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_05: Let's look at these numbers.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_05: No, math doesn't lie.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_05: So I've uh I've used that example uh many times over because there was it was a big transition for that group, a big learning experience and eye-opener.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_05: And it actually turned everything around almost immediately.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_05: Almost immediately, where that group of field supervisors who had been mechanics and now were masters, right?
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_05: They wanted to fix every elevator as soon as they could.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_05: They had 11 non-billable repair teams reporting to the office, and they would assign them work, and maybe by nine o'clock they'd be out on a job and back by 3:30 or dropping the truck off by four or what have you.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_05: And um that went away.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_05: We we got back to you know, how many people can we afford?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_05: You know, how do you want to set this up?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_05: How many, how many repair teams do we need?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_05: Most of the people.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: You said 11 non-billable teams.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of overhead, if I'm interpreting that correctly.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_05: Overhead, a lot of overhead.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_05: Actually, some of them were doing billable work, but there were 11 teams.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_05: I would say eight to three ratio, non-billable to billable.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that that went away quick as soon as those guys saw those numbers, you know, uh, of how their bonus was calculated.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_05: And by that was in July, and our fiscal year ended September.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_05: So in nine and a half months, we we were failing, failing miserably.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_05: But in two and a half months, we actually made as much as we made the previous nine and a half.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we we doubled our profitability dollars and percentage in two and a half months, yeah.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_05: Which gave us a ton of momentum into the next year, into the next quarter, so on and so forth.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_05: Those guys never missed, they never missed another quarterly bonus.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_05: And they were growing.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, every everyone was bigger than the previous for years, for several years there.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_05: And we went on a pretty good run from that was 2000, July of 2003, when I got there.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_05: Four, oh five, I think oh seven, we became a district, and that was a testament to how well the entire team did.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_05: And it wasn't just in service, uh modernization was in a similar was in a similar situation.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we were able to turn that around by just by standardizing our estimating and just setting ourselves up, being being more selective with the projects that we sold, being realistic.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_05: We I want to say it was 2008.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_05: We took home the award for the highest profitability in modernization in the country for Tissin.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_05: Uh new installation was another success story.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Tissin Crop was a security elevator office, which was a Dover distributor, Dover rep for years and years.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_05: Um, some some pretty good projects, some some big projects in the city, but in more recent years, would do maybe one or two a year.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_05: Nothing, nothing major.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_05: Um and I wanted to turn that around.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so tell me who were some of the people that you really felt like helped you hit that level of success.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_05: Bill Wolfies was the modernization manager.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_05: He ran the department along with Jim Chorney, ran operations, the field, field supervision.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, John Andrews ran in-house estimating project management, and really that team uh got everything together, uh really turned around.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_05: And again, it was every department at that point.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_05: It was service was fixed, construction was fixed.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_05: That team and and now modernization came together.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_05: So really it just rounded out that entire operation to make King of Prussia branch one of the best in the country.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_05: So again, with reorganization, I was able to uh to recruit Katherine Beshewski from Las Vegas.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_05: She was supposed to go to Allentown, but I made some deals to where she became the king of Prussia and uh and took over construction because I knew nothing about it at the time.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_05: So no, nothing compared to her, but uh she was able to come in and and we built this team with Jeff Smith came up from Richmond, Mike Bennett came from LA uh and built a great, great construction team there.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Pat Williams was our our foreman out in the field, and um yeah, they were able to come in and sell some huge projects.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_05: Comcast Center One was just a massive project that really really just took our our branch, our district to the next level.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_05: We were we were improving year over year, and then Comcast really just put us over the top to where we were one of the leaders for the for the company uh from you know as a branch.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_05: So um yeah, those those types of things just and thinking outside the box.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_05: Let's okay, we're gonna send another manager to Allentown.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_05: Well, no, that she's an expert in construction sales.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_05: We're a big city, we have very little construction.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_05: Like, let's put these pieces together to where the way they make sense.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I know it's complicated having two managers in the same office, but we'll we'll figure it out.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_05: We'll work through it.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's how you uh yeah, I mean, it's how you succeeded.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's what needed at the time, I guess.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_05: And that was that was a big uh that was a big transition point as well.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_05: It was a big big moment for for the company and for that branch and and really for my career.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so Bill, tell me a little bit about your current structure, you know, where you're working, what you're doing there.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_05: Yep, I'm with LCD Elevator.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_05: We are an independent elevator company, uh, three owners.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_05: Uh they're all around my age, and these these guys, it's it's a lot different than what I'm used to, but it's I mean that in a in a good way.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's a lot better.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_05: Uh Stu Tenzer, Richie Clark, and Steve Laiosa are all working owners, um, which means they're they're not just sitting there counting money, they're they're owners, they're workers.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_05: Um Stu handles sales and and finance.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_05: Richie handles monetization and new construction.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_05: He project manages projects, he helps me every time I I need some help, which sometimes is often.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and Steve handles maintenance and repair.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_05: And um actually is our top troubleshooter.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_05: So when there's yeah, when there's a problem nobody else can fix, Steve goes out and fixes it.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_05: Richie does the same on modern new installation.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_05: So uh they're not they're not typical owners.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're right, right, right.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_05: They're involved, they're day-to-day, uh, you know, ground floor guys, and it's it's refreshing.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's very cool for me being in mod sales and uh project management.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_05: I get to work with all three of these guys, and it's been a pleasure.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_05: I've been there just over two years, and uh it's it's a great situation.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: You said it's different than what you're used to.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do you love most about kind of being that close to the to the ownership, to the leadership?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, the lack of layers.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_05: So in you know, your multinationals or your bigger independents, there's layers of management, you know, before you get to the owner.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_05: And that the same holds for customers.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_05: You know, customers can get to ownership, employees can get to ownership.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so those layers are are gone, they're non-existent, and it just makes for for a really great working environment.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Cool, very cool.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what uh I mean, you know, obviously we could we could probably chat a lot more.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're kind of getting close to our time, but what what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned that really felt you felt like you know made all the difference?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you've you've touched on a few, but yeah.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um one of the one of the things that I thought about uh since we last spoke was I had uh my high school wrestling coach told us one time early on, become a student of the game.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, that meant going out, scouting other teams, going to clinics, going to see other college teams.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_05: See, everybody does things differently, you know, and try to go out and get get a more global perspective of things.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, so I've tried to apply that to a lot of different things.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_05: I applied it to elevators early on.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_05: Um Graham was one of my early bosses, and he was always at the office late.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_05: And once the office cleared out, a lot of times it was just the two of us.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_05: Maybe maybe the mod group was still working.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_05: I would say they were working on West Coast jobs, you know.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_05: But I would go in and and just sit with John and he'd be there with a they they'd smoke back in the office.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_05: They smoke in the office back.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like in the old days, right?
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the old days.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_05: And uh he'd be sitting there with his smoke and maybe uh afternoon coffee.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Going through the the PL statement.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_05: And um he's making notes, and then he'd show me what he was looking at and say, see here, you know, we're we're we're low in profit here, but we're doing really well here, but we need this number to be better.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm 24, 25 years old at the time, but just sitting there with him at his desk after hours, you know, no phones ringing, no chaos, no crises going on.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, I was able to learn a lot from John about reading those statements and really not just reading them, but what can we do about them?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_05: You know, what do we need to focus on that can fix?
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_05: For those types of things.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_05: So that those were really good lessons for me, you know, in my foundation to be a manager later on.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um one of the one of the simplest lessons I ever heard is one of the funniest, but also when you think about it, it's very true.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we had a repair manager, his name is Dick Massey.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_05: And as young sales reps, if we sold something, you'd be elated for about 30 seconds because you were getting that commission.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_05: Then it hit you.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_05: You got to go back to Dick's office and explain what you sold and what you were thinking.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_05: Like, oh man, are we ready for this?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_05: We better have all of our information, all of our all of our answers.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_05: And um, Mark D.C.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_05: was was a young sales rep with me.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_05: He and I grew up together in sales.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_05: And one time Mark had sold some some uh camera wiring.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_05: So we went back in Dick's office, and Mark's making his sales pitch.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_05: He says, Dick, I sold uh some coax.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_05: We're gonna run some coax for the security guys, uh, just from the machine room to the car.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_05: And um Dick says, Well, what's the what's the rise?
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_05: What's the travel?
• 46:06
  unknown: Right.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_05: Mark said, uh, you know, it's a three-stop, it's a hydro, it's a three-stop.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_05: And Dick was smoking, and he said, The Washington Monument's two stops.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_05: And when we I still laugh about it, it was 30 years ago.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_05: We we laughed so hard about that, like you just never had the answers, but the question is so valid, you know?
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_05: The Washington, and I use that, I tell people that you can't assume, right?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: That it's right.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_05: So, and in modernization, nothing is standard.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_05: I right, I don't let anybody say, oh, it's standard, there's no such thing.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_05: And if I have to, if I have to break out the Washington Monument story to prove my point, I'll do it.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, love it.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_05: I'll do it.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, but everybody I've told that story to, you know, when it when it applies and when it when I need to use it, they get it.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_04: They get it, sure.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_05: Everything has to be measured, everything has to be considered.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, there's no standards.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_05: And you know, communication is key.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_05: You know, we you're not just nobody's asking these questions just to quiz you, just to stump you, you know.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_05: Uh I do all the time.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta know your stuff with it today.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_05: You gotta know your stuff.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_05: Um one of our owners, Richie Clark, is I'm still learning from him to this day, and he'll ask a question, and I'll think, Well, I didn't think about that.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I should have, but you know, I was trying to trying to get something done, and I I didn't think about that, but I'll find out because that makes sense.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um so really those are those are some good lessons, whether it's for sales reps and expectations and cold calling, uh, expectations and sales cycles, managing a business, right, being profitable, and you know, surveying an elevator to get the needed information, a to price it and b to execute the project, you know, uh just having clear communication and uh getting all the information because nothing's standard in this business.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and this and this may be maybe redundant, but I'm just curious what I mean.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you were to give some advice to somebody who's just starting out, brand new, don't even know what they've you know, attached themselves to yet, what what would you say to them?
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_05: I think it would be just to learn as much as you can, become that student of the game, because you really don't know where you're gonna end up, what opportunities you're gonna be faced with, whether it's just having a weekend and now you're a truck driver in the elevator business, or being comfortable in your sales job and now you're an operations manager, or sitting in six million dollar a year Pittsburgh office to being thrown to Philadelphia at 32 million, so that with a lot of other challenges.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_05: So there's you know, things that you can do, just learn everything along the way because really you don't know where you'll end up.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_05: I happen to learn about modernization and love modernization sales, selling it, managing it.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and now 33 years later, I've done a lot of different things, but now I'm right where I enjoy being in mod sales.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I have that history of of my experience of seeing a lot of different perspectives.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_05: So I now I understand a lot of other perspectives as well, but I'm in a position where I enjoy doing what I'm doing, and um, you know, it wasn't it wasn't certainly wasn't a linear linear trajectory for me.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_05: I've went uh up and down in a lot of different directions um to get here.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_05: But um, you know, just learning one thing and just doing sales your whole career uh is limiting, you know.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_05: So I think learning various roles, various aspects of the business, you know, you're you're limitless at that point.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Opens up all kinds of opportunities to kind of write your ticket, honestly.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I see.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and maybe it maybe it's out of necessity, maybe you're you're in a transitional spot in your career, but you I can do that.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_05: You know, I I can take a job doing that or this or the other.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_05: Um, you know, it doesn't always have to be sales or just management, but there's other things I can do, I'm able to do.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so that opens up more doors for you as well.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Bill, thank you so much for being with me today.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're welcome.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_05: I've enjoyed it.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, and good luck to you.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_05: Thanks, Matt.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_05: I'll talk to you soon.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_05: All right, take care.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the All Red Group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can check us out online at elevatorcareers.net.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, and until next time, stay safe.