WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lopremento, and I hope all of you listeners can tell today's guests that I don't always say this, but I am so very excited because this episode is not gonna be like the others, and the reason is is because this entrepreneur all the fancy, trendy things that we hear about business.
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He cannot stand those.
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He's not looking for those.
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What he's really here to do is make business so simple and so results-based by cutting through all the noise that you might typically hear, not on our show but on other shows.
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Let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Norris Ivasian.
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Norris is the founder and CEO of Service Crucible, which is a consultancy dedicated to transforming home service businesses through operational mastery and strategic growth.
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With decades of experience in the home services industry, norris has driven remarkable results.
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Listen to these numbers, including growing a regional branch from $4 million to $12 million in just 12 months at a 25% net profit.
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He's a third generation trades professional and that's why Norris combines his hands-on operational expertise with deep financial acumen, having managed organizations from $2 million in revenue all the way up to more than $60 million in revenue.
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His unique approach breaks through the common revenue barriers that trap most service companies, focusing on relationship building and systematic excellence rather than quick fixes and I'll add in, rather than trends as well.
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Before founding Service Crucible, norris has earned recognition as Pensacola's Business Leader of the Year and has been endorsed by industry giants like Michael Son Services.
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He specializes in creating sustainable growth through his Four Forges methodology a proven framework that transforms potential into performance for home service businesses nationwide.
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We are all in for a real treat today, myself especially, so I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Norris Ivasian.
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All right, norris.
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This is gonna be a fun one.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks for having me, Brian.
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I really appreciate it.
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I have a feeling this is gonna be fun.
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Heck, yes.
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Well, first things first.
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You've got to take us beyond the bio, because I can humble brag about all your accomplishments for days, but I want you to give us that backstory.
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Who's Norris?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Because I can humble brag about all your accomplishments for days, but I want you to give us that backstory.
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Who's Norris?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Oh, let's see.
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So skip the enjoying long walks on the beach part right, get to the origin story of business.
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Okay, so it's going to be.
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Let's say I was an army civilian contractor for the longest time before moving to residential services.
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It didn't take me but a handful of months to just fall in love with the industry.
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It became a job, like I would say no, it became a way of life for me instead of a job.
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I enjoy every single bit of it, every part of it, every interaction inside and out.
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It just fascinated me, and I was lucky enough to join Michael and Son Services top 1% in the country when it comes to residential home service companies and it felt like I was a peewee football player joining the starting lineup of an NFL Super Bowl championship winning team.
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And the rest is history.
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I have an obsessive personality.
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I love the details, but I love bringing people together as well.
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And but the catalyst moment for me, brian, was later on in my career.
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After having held a lot of executive positions, I saw so many of your business owners the ones that make up the bulk of business owners in the home service industry struggling with basic concepts.
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And so they go to trade show after trade show after event, after you know, spending tens of thousands of dollars on training and technology and SaaS software as a service training and technology and SaaS software as a service and they're still stagnating.
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But now they have less money and they've bid into their cash flow and, after getting enough inquiries and encouragement from my wife, I said enough is enough.
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It's time to really shake things up, turn the industry over and on its head when it comes to coaching and, just come you know, do a common sense revolution in home services, because if the wheel ain't broke, don't fix it, and it's certainly not broken in home services.
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Yeah, norris, I love that overview.
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I'm just going to lead you straight into an area that I know you feel strongly about, because you talk about transforming coaching and I think, with my marketer's hat on that, if I wanted to get into the home services coaching industry, I'll just put together lots of sexy things that'll get people to buy.
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I'll talk about social media, I'll talk about AI, I'll talk about all these tips and tricks, but that appears to be your enemy, norris.
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Why and why is it that you love the simple stuff that works?
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And why is it that you love the simple stuff that works, it's timeless, it's you know, if the power is to go off or the server room of your favorite AI product was to crash or, let's say, phones are down, what are?
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You?
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Don't come from the background in my world of running paper invoices and using MapQuest or figuring out the neighborhoods to get to the address, the service address of where you want to go to.
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I mean, what are the fundamentals of what you're going to tackle?
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They're not necessarily the enemy.
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I certainly do make it feel and sound that way.
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Brian are a tool, nothing less, nothing more.
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All right.
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And if you are just getting into carpentry, if you're just getting into any trade, and you walk into a specialty store that sells tools for your trade and you're gonna buy the most expensive, most advanced tool, you're still to be worth 10 bucks an hour, not 150 bucks an hour that somebody that's got 30 years in the trade is able to charge for that.
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Now you expand that metaphor a little bit more and there's some more nuances involved, but for the most part, that covers it.
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It's like know what the core is before adding something to your repertoire or your inventory or your tech stack that's just going to gather dust on the shelf.
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Yeah, norris, when I hear you talk about that, I'll tell you where my head goes is.
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I actually believe home service businesses are the epitome of business fundamentals, because there's a lot of things that AI can do, there's a lot of things that technology can do, but it cannot protect my house from insects, it cannot fix my toilet.
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There's a lot of those things that technology cannot do, whereas when I think about home services, you are forced, there's no way other than talking to your customer.
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There's no way other than walking into somebody's place and actually doing the work, and so when I think about that, you're probably one of the best people I know that's equipped to talk about the actual fundamentals.
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Of course, I just alluded to, like customer service, sales, all of these things, but I know that you've got quite an in-depth framework into what those fundamentals are.
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What do they look like from your perspective?
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what those fundamentals are.
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What do they look like from your perspective?
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We have to start with the foundational bedrock of the home services industry, and I would even venture to say that it's the foundational bedrock of any industry where any transaction takes place and that's relationships.
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And it's not just the relationship that you have with the customer, it's the relationship you have with your team, the relationship that your team has with one another.
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The very first impression a potential customer is going to get or have of you when they see your company truck, when they see your employees in uniform Are they wrinkled up?
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Are they tucked in?
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Do they have putty stains on their pants?
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Are they smoking outside their truck?
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At the gas station, you can see empty energy drink cans on the dashboard.
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All right, and that also goes for the IT retail services.
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First impressions are everything.
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And now, with technology and information being at our fingertips, if first impressions took a split second, now it's taking a split second of a split second for us to get a first impression through.
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You either win the customer or you don't within that precious first moment of time.
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Customer or you don't within that precious first moment of time.
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So that's the first and most critical, monumental, the foundational principle, and it's a scary path of self discovery that a lot of people take, but one of the biggest aha moments a leader or an operator can have is identifying themselves as a bottleneck.
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And if they are okay, it's not the end of the world.
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You still have the vision, maybe, so you can find implementers or an eos they call it integrators to put the rubber to the road and help capture your vision.
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And then the others really fall into place right after the bedrock of relationships, which is know your numbers.
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What are your drivers?
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What is the most important KPI for your business?
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Is it a revenue producing activity?
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And if you don't know what your KPIs are, you're no better than an order taker.
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You're not a driver, you're not an implementer.
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You're not painting out the edges of the massive canvas.
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That is your vision.
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So that's, that's a.
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That's a undeniable principle as well, and the other one is communications and expectation.
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So it's, it's a.
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All right, you know your KPIs.
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Good for you.
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You and your management team know your KPIs.
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But if I was, for example, to come into your place of work or get into one of your team's Slack channels and I would ask anybody in any position in your company.
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One simple question what is it that needs to be accomplished today by you in order for you to feel like you've won the day?
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And if it's not a clear, coherent, instant answer, then they don't know.
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Well, if they don't know, then I'm going to assume a lot of other people don't know in your organization.
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It's going to be the blind leading the blind, probably going to have a trail of a few upset customers as well.
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So there's some fine tuning to do.
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I mean, I can go on and on with principles, but, um, you know, we can, we can coin that to Holy Trinity for now.
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Yeah, Norris, you're reminding me.
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It's one of the most impactful pieces of business advice that I've ever gotten.
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I was.
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I was actually at a conference going to the bathroom and this incredible speaker ran a hundred million dollar plus.
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Business was also running to the bathroom and so I asked her.
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We were going to separate bathrooms, but I asked her what is your quickest and best piece of advice?
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I was 21 years old at the time and I wanted to hear from someone who was so successful.
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And, Norris, she said something to me that still to this day, I've never forgotten.
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She said how you do anything is how you do everything.
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Norris, I have taken it so to heart that I feel like it's guided the way that I operate.
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You and I were talking off the air about processes and preparation and all the things that we do operationally, and it's that advice that has leaked into all the things I've done.
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Here you are talking about wrinkles in a shirt and is your shirt tucked in?
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And all of these small details.
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I feel like it's either counter to or it's a delicate balance where, in today's world, we hear people talk about just do things that are good enough.
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Sometimes it feels to me like good enough is the enemy of how you do anything is how you do everything.
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What's your take on that, Because it is such a delicate balance?
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Yeah, that's powerful.
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So, brian, the gold standard of coaching for the longest time in my industry is Nexstar, and how they end every training session is with that powerful statement how you do anything is how you do everything, and it's just.
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It resonates, it echoes into your past, present and and future.
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Is good enough?
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Good enough?
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I struggle with that, I really do, and I'm probably the wrong person to ask that question, because there's days that I'm complacent.
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I have to be honest, I have to be transparent.
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Show me a superhuman and I'll show you a cyborg.
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Everybody's had a moment of weakness, which, in turn, probably turned into a crucible of transformation for them, for them to come out the other side looking and accomplishing what they look like and what they've accomplished.
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Me personally, good enough is not good enough, and I have to knock on the thought process door of a place that I'm very familiar with and sometimes struggle with gratitude.
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Grateful, if you are absolutely grateful, beyond a doubt, about one small thing, then it's impossible to be upset about many a great thing.
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And if you're grateful and you feel content and you feel whole and what you're doing is good enough to make you happy, then by all means the world is your oyster, have all the fun in the world, but if you good enough is good enough has put you in a market, in a space of competition, where other people who are, as if not substantially, more driven than you, are competing for market share.
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Good enough is never good enough and you should never take it personally if your body of work or your means of producing for yourself and providing for your family and your team is being attacked, not directly, but because you're just not that good enough.
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You shouldn't take that personally.
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And that's going to be the moment in time where you have to decide if you're going to raise the bar on yourself or you're going to kind of step back into the shadows of irrelevancy.
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And if you have a transaction, you have a transaction.
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If you grow, great.
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If you don't, well.
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Everybody kind of saw it coming.
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So that's my take on good enough being good enough boom.
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I love that.
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That's.
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That's the harsh realities of business that when we're consuming business content, it all sounds hunky-dory and I know that my level of excitement always makes things sound that way.
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But, norris, it's something I think about when I put late nights in.
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I'm a chronic night owl and when I'm putting those late nights in, I think to myself how few other podcasters are willing to do this, and that's the reality is that it's kind of that sports quote I don't know if Kobe Bryant said it or someone but they talk about every second you're not working, somebody else is working to take it all away from you, and those are the harsh realities.
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With that said, I love the fact that you highlighted you have days where you're not at your best, same with me.
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We all inevitably have that, and I'm going to use that to extrapolate out and talk about revenue walls, growth walls.
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We all hit those walls and, norris, it's something about your business that I really appreciate is you've seen those walls of predictable revenue points and then you've also helped people work through those.
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What do those look like?
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Because I'm sure that there's different inflection points that all businesses face, not just home service businesses.
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So I want to hear some of those predictable walls that we hit with regards to revenue and some would say that I'm on pace to hit my million dollar run rate.
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I'm knocking on the door of 500.
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And I have to be twice as different, twice as good, twice as capable to compound 500,000 into a million.
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That's the reality of it.
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You know it's um, do you?
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Do you look at the number on a spreadsheet or handwritten in front of you on paper?
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And you look at revenue walls, it's like wow, you take into stock everything that you did and you, you come to realize, man, that was a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to that point.
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How much more can I squeeze out of myself before I have to hire, before I have to find another vertical?
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Do I even need another vertical?
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Am I truly getting the full lifetime value of clients?
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Am I upselling enough?
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Am I providing enough value?
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How many doors am I closing without even being conscious to the fact?
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And so that's the part where I'm taking my own medicine.
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And it's a very interesting position to be in, because it's kind of like an engineer self-diagnosing, because for the longest time I was an operator in the field.
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I've done several successful exits, I've scaled, I've tripled companies and national background A lot of the revenue growth barriers that I see, other than the people element, where people in positions of leadership might be the bottlenecks.
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It's also a cultural shift that needs to take place and it's not a knock on the culture itself, but maybe it needs to cycle through its next event of evolution for it to be capable of seeing, perceiving and accomplishing the breaking through that revenue barrier.
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But then going back to basic blocking and tackling what you don't, you can't manage, what you don't measure.
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And so, for example, in home services and heating and cooling, I coach capacity planning and if you have one install team, so that's one lead installer, one helper to change out the air conditioning units in a home.
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Usually it takes them six to 10 hours depending on the type of system.
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That it is Well amazing if you can book 100% of their schedule.
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But your average work month has 21 days schedule.
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But your average work month has 21 days.
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Let's say, for easy math, it's 20 days out of the month.
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The average work month is 21 days.
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Just say it's 20 days.
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You go for 85% capacity.
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That's a benchmark that we go after.
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You round that up, that's 17 installs a month that your install crew is capable of putting in jobs, full system replacements, your big ticket items, and.
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But in order for you to get to that number, you need to have service calls or estimate requests that turn into replacement opportunities.
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Then you close that into the actual replacements itself and I just highlighted several kpis on that end in order for you to get there into first place.
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Now, continuing on easy math, let's say your average ticket is ten thousand dollars and you actually follow through and be able to deliver um 17 installs, that's 170 000.
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Now that's $170,000.
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Now are you overpriced?
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Are you underpriced?
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Where is your profitability?
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That all plays into it.
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But from a basic blocking and tackling approach to all of that, that's one way to look at it.
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When you look at your capacity planning, what is your average ticket?
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What is your closing percentage?
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Are you looking at customer subsets?
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What percentage of customers are first-time customers?
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From what campaigns you're advertising on?
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What is your average ticket per zip code?
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You can go crazy into details in the math.
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Before you advertise more dollars, before you buy a fancy new tool or get a new software, look at what your latent ceiling is.
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Before you bring on more personnel, maybe you need to upgrade the personnel, or if you're a one-person show or you just have a handful of people on the team.
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Why don't you disrupt yourself and see what you could be doing different to reach your maximum potential?
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And and then you just painted a clear picture into what your revenue barriers are and what you need to change before you get there.
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Otherwise, if you just throw money on things and say you grew and you have all this revenue that you're proud of and you're pounding your chest about, but then you look at your financials and there's little to no profitability left and your cash flow needs to be resuscitated every month with fresh injections, with fresh injections, that's, you know.
00:21:38.845 --> 00:21:41.634
Did you really grow or did you just compound all the things that are keeping you up at night and making you lose hair.
00:21:41.655 --> 00:21:42.499
Norris, I'll tell you this.
00:21:42.499 --> 00:22:11.521
I want to add this into the conversation, because hearing you talk about these things, use the word disruption, and even when you talk about your own run rate for your own personal business, I remember being a younger entrepreneur and the times where that was discouraging to me, because what I'm really hearing is that notion of if nothing changes, then nothing changes, and to compound with that, the notion that if you keep doing what you're doing, then, or if you keep doing what you're doing, you're not going to end up somewhere different.
00:22:11.521 --> 00:22:12.683
I think about tennis.
00:22:12.683 --> 00:22:25.194
I picked up tennis and I remember that in the tennis rating scale, so if you're a 4.0 player, in order for you to get to 4.5, you have to be able to beat your current self 6.0, 6.0.
00:22:25.194 --> 00:22:28.143
That is a massive gap in quality.
00:22:28.143 --> 00:22:33.182
So what got you here will not get you there, and that's really what I'm hearing from you today.
00:22:33.323 --> 00:22:43.215
And what I think is fascinating about that is all of our industries are being disrupted right now, whether it's through technology, whether it's through ai, your own industry, the home service industry.
00:22:43.215 --> 00:22:50.306
I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs are turning their heads there and saying wait, there's opportunity and I know private equity is getting into your market.
00:22:50.306 --> 00:22:51.369
Now again.
00:22:51.369 --> 00:22:54.461
Coming back to the, does this discourage you or does it?
00:22:54.461 --> 00:22:56.107
Does it fire you up?
00:22:56.107 --> 00:22:58.265
Does it make you so excited to operate there?
00:22:58.265 --> 00:23:05.090
For you, I know it's the latter Norris, so what are some of those challenges or opportunities that this changing market is presenting?
00:23:07.220 --> 00:23:08.182
It's showing to.
00:23:08.182 --> 00:23:14.089
It really highlights to me the where see the.
00:23:14.089 --> 00:23:54.931
The defining line of the difference between winners and losers going forward into the future is the adaptability of of incumbent players and new players, because you need to have retroactive adaptability to be able to hang out at the water cooler or the coffee pot if you're new to the industry, and you need to have the courage to think outside the box and do things and entertain things that you never have done or thought about doing before if you're incumbent, and so that's something really important to keep in mind.
00:23:54.931 --> 00:24:14.747
Now there's a lot of new people that are coming to the industry, entrepreneurs that maybe were on the finance side of things or retail side of things, or they come from the hospitality industry and, I think, as a whole.
00:24:14.747 --> 00:24:37.823
If they are leading with integrity and taking care of the communities that they serve and it's not just about the numbers but it's more about the relationships and the investment that, in essence, it is where it's an intangible ROI, but an ROI nonetheless, then we should welcome them with open arms and learn from them, and they can learn from us.
00:24:39.065 --> 00:24:44.700
There is plenty of pie to go around in just about any industry that you're in.
00:24:44.700 --> 00:24:58.596
If you were to do a market share analysis for one trade in a town that's about about 200,000 people just 5% is going to, depending on the market, make your market.
00:24:58.596 --> 00:25:04.133
5% of that market share is going to put you in $10 to $15 million top line revenue range.
00:25:04.133 --> 00:25:05.662
That's a lot of money.
00:25:05.662 --> 00:25:10.309
You run that at 20% net, you're banking $2 million.
00:25:10.309 --> 00:25:16.882
Now that's a lot of money to reinvest into the business and compound your growth rate with.
00:25:16.882 --> 00:25:20.751
So yeah, I mean there is a lot of disruption.
00:25:20.751 --> 00:25:52.590
But where the dust settles for me at the end of the day is If you truly love what you do, if you're proud of what you're a part of, if you're passionate about your industry, your people and how you're impacting your community, then you protect what you love and you are the person that's going to make the difference whether or not the disruption is good or bad.
00:25:53.732 --> 00:25:55.194
Yeah, norris, I'll tell you what.
00:25:55.194 --> 00:26:05.284
Hearing you talk about both the micro economic conditions as well as here we are towards the end of this conversation talking about the macro it makes me want to get into your entrepreneurial and your executive mind.
00:26:05.284 --> 00:26:18.844
So I do want to switch gears a little bit and talk not about your industry and not about the work that you do, but I want to talk to Norris the entrepreneur, because I'm fascinated by the way that you think.
00:26:18.844 --> 00:26:24.523
And, with that in mind, one thing I always love hearing from entrepreneurs is the time horizon that they're looking at, because I feel like we all use the word very early on in our conversation, obsessive.
00:26:24.523 --> 00:26:31.007
We're all obsessive about the things that we're working on, all the opportunities, our current projects, our growth plans.
00:26:31.007 --> 00:26:33.073
You talk about reinvesting in your business.
00:26:33.073 --> 00:26:41.708
So tell me about Norris the entrepreneur, when you sit down and you do your strategic planning and envisioning what's that time horizon that you look at?
00:26:46.099 --> 00:26:53.451
Time horizon for me would be what are immediate results that I want in the first three, six, nine, 12 months?
