Learn the ins and outs of HVAC sales in today’s episode with Drew Cameron, President and Master Sellutionist of HVAC Sellutions. Drew shares his knowledge based on his accumulated experiences on some of the most progressive and powerful education and business development tools available in the world for the contracting business. HVAC Sellutions is now called Flow Odyssey. It is the industry’s leading marketing support and sales recruiting, training, coaching, and performance enhancement organization. Their training program trained thousands of salespeople, sales managers, and owners nationwide in the art of effective selling skills resulting in new levels of success in sales and customer service. Listen to be equipped with proper and effective selling skills!
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How To Properly Sell HVAC Options With Drew Cameron
We are back with a guest. At this point in his career, he is an industry legend. Everybody knows who he is. He puts out a ton of great content through EGIA, his coaching and load calculation business. We are going to be talking about some of that stuff, and both him and his business partners’ unique approach to sales that doesn’t make you feel icky.
Drew and I met face-to-face the first time in Vegas at the EGIA event. I followed Drew for a while and everybody there. The more we were able to talk and have a conversation, the more I was like, “This guy is a wealth of knowledge.” Drew is underpublicized as to how much information he has and how much he is willing to share. I’m super thankful to meet him and have a conversation in person.
Drew is not beating his own chest. He is not out there promoting himself. Not as many people know who he is and what he does but he has got some super valuable stuff. Hopefully, you get a lot out of this episode.
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Drew, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I’m good.
Thanks for having me back on again.
For anybody who missed that previous episode, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and all that good jazz.
I appreciate the comments leading up to this. My business partner, Russ and I like to call it humble confidence. We are not bombastic out there but to each our own. I grew up in this business from the age of twelve. I’m the son of a boss. I had an older brother, two years older and a younger brother and sister, two years younger. After swim team practice, we would come home and go to work starting at age twelve. My dad started the business a year before I was born. I worked in every facet of the business. We did largely residential new construction.
There was very little service replacement until the early ’90s when the bottom dropped out of the new construction. We were on the brink of bankruptcy at that time. The union was picketing our jobs in our offices. It became a hot mess. We decided to pivot in 1990 and become a residential company. I was in college as that was happening but I was still working in the business part-time. We transitioned to a full-residential replacement to a service company. It’s a little bit of commercial work and very little custom new construction at that point.
In 1996, we ended up selling it to a local utility company called Delmarva Power, which was building a regional strategy around five states for in-home services because the utilities had become deregulated. I played that game for about eighteen months. I jumped ship and went over to Service Experts, which is a publicly-traded company. I did that for about another eighteen months. In 1999, everybody was telling me that what I was doing for Service Experts, I should do for myself and for clients, which was business consult, coach and train.
Since 1999, we started Supernova Selling Systems. We ultimately evolved that in 2004 to HVAC Sellutions. In 2021, we evolved that into Flow Odyssey. I brought on my business partner Russ Horrocks, who you had on the show before as well. That’s the Flow Odyssey side and then you mentioned Energy Design Systems. Phil Jeffers was a gentleman who started that company back in the ’70s. He was building load calculation and energy modeling tools. He worked with utilities, builders, manufacturers and contractors for years. He sold us our first computers and software with John H. Cameron & Sons.
That would have been in the ’80s when we started doing things with floppy disks to getting things back and forth because there were no hard drives. These are 5.25-inch floppy disks. One had your operating system and the other one had the program you are running. Those were Kaypro computers. They were the size of a breadbox. If I’m telling you the size of a breadbox and you don’t know what one is, you know I’m old. The other thing was he had an energy calculator that ran a tape out of it. It was a Sharp calculator that he packaged into an aluminum attaché case that he got from Sharper Image.
People want to deal with people and they buy from people they like and people they trust and respect. Click To TweetWhat was in it originally was a liquor set. He realized, “What I’m going to do is change the foam and the calculator will fit in the liquor set.” You can tell that that made sense. That was the first foray into the software. Sadly, Phil passed away in 2014. I took over the company for his widow. I ran it for her for three and a half years as a good-faith gesture because the man had done so much good for my family, me and the industry. I wanted to keep the thing flowing for his wife if I could.
I got some guys who came along and said, “We don’t want to see this disappear. What if we invest with you and we will buy the company?” I was like, “Let’s do it.” In 2017, we bought the software company. That’s Energy Design Systems. There we have the load calculator and energy auditor. We have a brand-new flat-rate residential price book tool coming out here.
Tell me a little bit about the price book tool that’s coming out. I want to make sure that we touch on the fact of how simple it is to use this platform throughout the sales process. We have all used several other software platforms where you could spend a week doing something. Especially if you have never done it before, you have to take a course on how to use that platform. Even then, it’s going to have all these variables. You could be so off if you are not doing it right. Can you go into a little bit of detail about those two?
Let’s start with the load calculator because that’s a tool that has been out there for many years. I grew up doing the forms and then got ACCA-certified using a spreadsheet. Eventually, Elite Software has a program called RHVAC Room by Room Load Calculator with great detail and ACCA-oriented. What we ultimately came to find is that most contractors go into a house and they know the size of the equipment that the house requires. They will go ahead and run a rule of thumb. There are lots of rules of thumb out there based on square footage.
What most contractors do when they do a load calculation is that they do a load to get the result that they already believe. They are gamifying the load. Most of them are only doing that because they probably have to do the load to get the permit. They are not doing the load for the real reason. Number one, you should do it to verify because what we know about houses in construction now is more than what we knew about when these houses were built. Houses lose and gain heat.
Technology equipment nowadays operates way differently. We had to move more air. Most contractors don’t even know the size by the sensible gain versus the total gain. They sense by the size of the total gain. They are usually off by a quarter to half a ton. What Phil realized was, “We had been selling the Elite Software and training it for years all over the United States and Canada. Let’s build a very simple tool that the contractors will use because it only takes five minutes. It’s not a science project that takes 30 to 60 minutes. Let’s make it easy enough that they will do it, number one. Number two, it’s easy enough for the customer to be showing it and be educated as to what is going on.”
That bought right into our core sales philosophy. When you educate a customer and give them good information so they can make a good decision, they make better decisions, which means they are going to buy from the person who helped them get it. That is what became the load calculator. Hank Rutkowski is the author of ACCA’s Manual J. I highly respect ACCA and Hank, but even they say their tool is oversized by 20%.
Here in the South, humidity is a big deal for us. If you oversize the system by a ton or half a ton because their old system isn’t keeping up, we all know it’s because it’s low in refrigerants. It’s got a clogged evap coil and it has never been maintained, but they want to go up a ton or half a ton. In reality, we know that’s not a good choice to make because there’s going to be a humidity nightmare. If you keep doing it, all of a sudden, you have lawsuits on your hands because they have mold growing in their house.
That’s where he perfected this tool. It was in Texas and Florida because he had these deals with a couple of manufacturers and new construction builders. He had to deal with another manufacturer of that geothermal stuff. I don’t want to push manufacturers. He learned how things work out there in the real world. The whole idea behind any load calculation is number one, let’s figure out what’s the size of the equipment that the house requires. Once we know that, we know how much air we need to move. Once we know how much air we need to move, then we can do a duct evaluation.
I don’t care if you are using a tape measure and ductulator or if you are going to do what National Comfort Institute, known as NCI Protocols. The National Comfort Institute says, “Pull out a flow hood. Do a static pressure test and flow hood test. Measure the airflow and take the flow pressure of the system.” That right there is a game-changer. A flow hood is a lethal weapon because a homeowner starts to follow you around with it.
How many of us have ever asked a homeowner, “Any hot spots or cold spots in the house?” They say no because they know the answer leads to them having to probably pay more and you are going to try and sell them something. The math, facts, science and data of a flow hood and load calculation don’t lie. If you give the customer a flow hood, they start measuring and you start recording the data. You are like, “This one is not moving as much as that one. It should be moving the same.” They are like, “I would think so. Is that something you can fix?” “Is that something you want to fix?” “It depends on how much it costs.”
When I get up to the attic, I will take a look and see what is going on. I can tell you what is going on and what the issue is. I can tell you a couple of options to fix it and you can tell me if you want to do it or not. When they come back and see the test results, it’s like going to a doctor and getting the lab results. They prescribe a test, surgery or prescription. You don’t take it and then you complain that you didn’t get better. It doesn’t make any sense.
The website where you can check out more information is www.EDS.tech. They have information on both the load calculator and auditor. Do you have anything for the price book coming out on the site or anything like that?
We don’t have the information up yet because it’s not launched. The price book is going to be a cool tool. It’s the first tool that I’m aware of that is out there that is not proposal-based. Most of the software is designed to generate a proposal. In our process, the proposal is a week-sales process. What happens is you generate these proposals and the customer then has all of your information to shop you. The customer sees the brand logo, brand name, model, efficiency, capacity and all the details about the things that are baked into it.
While the things may be the most expensive part of the solution, they are the least important part of the solution because 70% of the manufacturing process takes place in the home. The manufacturer is not responsible for the customer’s success but the contractor is. Interestingly enough, if you look at all the tools, I know a lot of the vendors of these tools. They are nice guys. They have done a lot of great stuff for the industry. They have designed a tool to the manufacturer’s specifications. They partner with the manufacturer to get the audience to buy their tool. That’s a way to go with the business but in our mind, it’s not the best way.
They have software platforms. You know the big behemoth out there that has its software and pricing tools. They also generated one that’s manufacturer-oriented because they have partnerships with manufacturers and distributors as well. What we built is something that’s based on the Excel tool that I created back in 2004. It’s got seven positions from the top of the line down to the entry-level and everything in between. It’s brand agnostic.
There are brands and models in the background so you know what to put in there as far as your cost structure. It’s very simple to set up. You could probably set it up in a day. You will have the super admin account and user account. The cool thing about it is it will be something that you can either use on a tablet or laptop. You will be able to print it out into the form of a book, which is what we do with our Excel spreadsheet. We take a price book or a menu into the home.
Are those seven choices that were given to the client not too many? Some people coach 6, 4 and 3 options. I know why I get this because I was a service tech once before too. They say anything over four options and the customer gets confused. Tell me your thoughts on that.
Two studies were done. One was back in the ’70s. It was done by Harvard. It was looking at 35-millimeter cameras. The idea was a choice of one is a choice of none. It’s a gun to the head, “Do you want the camera or not?” If you give a customer two choices, it was about a 50/50 split. If you give a customer three choices of cameras, 21% bought at the upper end, about some 70% in the middle, and about 7% to 10% at the lower end. It’s that bell curve type thing.
In 1994, Notre Dame did a study. They said, “How many choices is too many choices?” They came out and settled on six. I read another study but I forgot where that came from. It had something to do with psychological middles. This whole mantra is based on people who look at the high and low. They throw those out and settle in the middle. With 7, if you throw out the high and low, there are still 5 left and an actual middle. There are 2 above the middle and 2 below the middle.
If you go through buyer psychology, there’s a book called Buyology. One of the studies that they did is there are three levels of buyers. There are premium-based, value-based and economic-based buyers. When you bake it all together along with color scheming, price points, financing and benefits, that’s what we did. We say, “There are three buyers. At every stage, there are 3 options, and 2 of the systems overlap. There are 3 at the top, 3 at the middle where 1 overlaps, and 3 at the bottom where 1 overlaps. Depending on what type of buyer you have, there are three choices for you.”
The comfort advisor’s job is to direct where we’ll be getting this conversation based on the survey in the visit and the questions and conversations that you had in the home. You are only having a conversation about 2 or 3 choices. The cool thing about this is it’s the perspective of seeing all seven that says, “I know where I exist in the marketplace as a consumer.” The most powerful thing we have ever seen happen out there is pulling all that psychology behind the tool.
In the breakout that I took, Russ was the play-by-play and you chimed in after that sort of thing. You dive into the psychology of a buyer. You are not just teaching, “Say this when a customer says this.” You are teaching, “What is the customer thinking and what’s the why behind it?” That way, you are growing a skillset instead of just copying what someone else told you to say.
I had a contractor that I invited who has taken some sales training from people we know. He felt like a robot. His sales were worse afterward because he was trying to do the process instead of being live and in-person with the conversation, and understanding what the customer was thinking when he was talking to him. Maybe that’s a segue into talking about your Flow Odyssey and the process behind how you built that.
Greatness is something that is achieved in a different fashion. Click To TweetIt’s not unusual that your colleague felt that way. Why? It’s because he was being told to do something, not be someone. I don’t want you to be Russ or me. We can’t be you. I want you to be the best and the most elevated version of yourself. That’s why we call our process not the sales process. We don’t do sales training. We use the word sales because everybody knows it. We call what we teach the Elevated Consumer Buying Experience because that’s what it’s about. Customers are either going to buy from you or they are not going to buy from you. You are either helping them to buy from you or you are driving them away because you either validate or eliminate their fears. Most salespeople validate their fears.
Here’s the interesting thing. There’s nothing wrong with any of the other sales training that’s out there. It’s not good, bad, right or wrong. It’s the same as ours. I don’t say ours is better. It’s just different. What we come to realize is that you can be successful selling that way in selling things, wheeling and dealing on price and discounts. You just can’t be great. Greatness is something that is achieved in a different fashion. We have chosen a more human way of selling that aligns with the way people choose to buy. It’s based on psychology.
I like that because if you are not a natural-born salesman or salesperson, sometimes it’s very much like, “I can see that working for some people but it doesn’t work for me because I’m not a salesman.” Creating the psychology side of things and knowing the why behind it, then you are serving. I feel like you are less selling and more serving. That’s where I’m at. Where I thrive is the serving aspect of things. Is this just for your comfort consultant or salesperson or is this for service experts also?
This is for everybody. Being more human is a principle of life. It works for technicians and customer service call-takers. If you have the outbound call-takers or some people call it inside sales. It works with them as well and the company advisors. We don’t get into the new construction commercial space anymore. When we do, it works there too. People want to deal with people. They buy from people they like, trust and respect. They respect you if they sense that you don’t have an agenda. Most sales are outcome-focused. The reason is that we keep score.
This is in our training. John Wooden used to coach UCLA basketball back in the ’70s. He was one of the winningest coaches of all time at any level in any sport. He is not that guy now. He got out of the game before he continued to build his legacy. He had an 83.3% winning percentage. Any of us would love that closing ratio. He won ten NCAA tournaments at 1.7 March Madness Tournaments in a row. He never coached the word win or winning in practice or pregame.
He said, “The results will be what they should be and when they should be based on how we execute. The emotional ups and downs of winning and losing preclude us from executing at the highest level.” He wanted to remove that from his player’s psyche. He focused on execution. They won more games and tournaments than anybody else.
On day one, he would have the players show up to practice. He would have them sit down and take their sneakers and socks off. He would teach them how to put their socks and sneakers on because his belief was if your socks aren’t on right, then your sneakers aren’t going to fit your foot right. If your socks and sneakers aren’t on right, you are going to get blisters. If you get blisters, you can’t practice. If you can’t practice, you can’t play. Let’s go back to the fundamentals. Let’s be better humans.
I was going to ask you about what you mentioned about John doing the socks and shoes. You even mentioned going back to the fundamentals. At any point, do you have people taking offense like, “This is basic. This is not for me. This is for your new guys. Don’t come back to me with this nonsense.” Do you ever have that situation? I like the thought process there. I just wonder if you have someone that’s already selling $2 million a year, and then you present them with this thought process. Anybody that’s halfway intelligent wants to improve. They are going to take information from the platform that will help. I wonder if you have seen improvements in those individuals that are already selling a lot. Do they take offense to dumb down to the fundamentals type thing?
Let’s put it this way. They don’t readily speak up in a class and say, “This is stupid.” We have gotten some reviews where people didn’t like it for some reason. Maybe they never wanted to come to the class, to begin with. I had a prisoner for a couple of days. Some people come to class and they are prisoners. Some people come and they are on vacation. Some people come to learn. Let’s say I’m sure there are. A closed mind will find 1,000 excuses. An open mind will find 1,000 ways. You only need to find one way.
Everybody can learn. The cool thing is we get a lot of testimonials from people who say, “I have been doing this for X number of years. This is the first thing that I have attended, listened or watched.” They are taking the course, whether it’s live or virtual, “It is new and original. It made sense and felt good.” Russ got a testimonial. Forty years in the business and the guy says, “I have heard everybody in the industry and this was the first unique approach that I heard. It made sense that I felt comfortable.”
We get a lot of that. I had a guy send me an email. He said, “I had my best year ever. The three months that I got to work with you were life-changing.” That’s what it’s about. It’s not just about what you do in the home. It’s about who you become through our training. When we come in, we don’t focus just on the role. We focus on your identity, who you are and how you show up in life.
People like to think there’s a professional life and personal life. It’s just life. You ebb and flow. You modulate based on what you do. I don’t want you to be somebody different to your wife, husband and kids and then be somebody different in the home. I want the best version of you showing up in every facet of what you do because you are a human being. You are not a human doing.
I took Russ and Drew’s breakout. I’m like, “It’s sales training. Let’s learn something.” My wife had been in sales. She has done sales training with Lennox. She has another trainer at a larger company. The one in Arizona Perfect got a system there with Trane. I can’t remember their name. She has taken sales training. I have taken plenty of sales training. It was eye-opening on the philosophy. A lot of the feedback I heard after the show was people coming up to you while I was waiting my turn to officially introduce myself. It was a very unique approach. Everyone was like, “I don’t have to feel shady or feel like I’m selling snake oil. I could be myself and sell.” It was one of those moments for a lot of people. I was happy to take that class.
Can you give me an example of how we would deal with a client objection through the process? I would love for the people who are reading this to get a little bit of a feel for it. We don’t have to go through an entire process or anything like that. What would make it different? How would we increase our closing percentage dealing with objections?
I learned all the traditional ways of selling from the masters, Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar. I met these guys. I went to Tom Hopkins’ house in Arizona years ago. I read the books and have taken the classes. I have the gift of the amazing education that my parents gave me. My dad sent me there to the University of Maryland. I went and got educated through the trades. Some of the names are still out there teaching the stuff. I have read and attended their stuff. What I learned was it isn’t the reality. It’s all designed to get an agenda. If I focus on the people, then the results will take care of themselves.
We have been doing a version of what I have been teaching since the early ’90s. Some people get me along the way there. To answer your question, what I came to realize is any sales training that has in their book or course’s synopsis how to handle and overcome objections is flawed training. It already says, “We know our process doesn’t work. We are going to give you back doors to escape at the backside.” The idea is to deal with all of the things that you know you are going to get hit with. Ultimately, that becomes objections, price, money, affordability or what someone else might be doing versus what you might be offering. It’s all of that stuff.
If you are not having those conversations as part of your conversation, they become objections. The way to get rid of objections at the end is to deal with everything that you know is going to be an issue with this customer during the conversation. With that being said, does that mean that on occasion, I or some of the guys we do ride-along coaching with don’t run into that? Do we have ways to handle that? Sure, we do. Number one, the idea is to avoid objections. It’s how to deal with it. Number two is to have a very human way of dealing with it if it does come up.
Let’s say the customer says, “I’ve got a price on essentially the same thing for about $2,000 less.” Let’s understand it. If the customer thinks that what I’m offering and what someone else is offering are exactly apples to apples and if you hear that kiss of death phrase, you realize that’s on you. That’s not on the customer. That’s number one. Number two, you are allowing this customer comparison-shop because you comparison-sold. If you continue to comparison-sell, then the customer treats it as a commodity and they will buy your price. If you were compelling, there would be no comparison. That’s what we teach in our sales process as well or in our education.
When a customer says that to me, I say, “I’m familiar with ABC Company. I know what they do and how they do things. We do things differently here at John H. Cameron & Sons. I’m not going to tell you we are right or wrong or we are better or anything like that. That’s up to you to decide what is the best value for your dollar. Here’s what I can tell you. If they know that their products and services are worth better than ours, if that’s how they see themselves and that’s what they think they are worth with the value that they bring to the table, along with the impact that they are going to make in your life, along with the value and the level of service that they are going to provide after they do the installation, then that’s what they are worth. That’s not who we are.” I will then lay out some of the differences. The customers who choose to do business with John H. Cameron & Sons have told us, “It’s those differences that make the difference.” I can then say, “You can go online and look at the reviews.”
As long as you have the stuff to back it up. If you are more expensive with worse service and you have no reviews online, that’s different. You can’t stand on that leg. We have a lot of people who live up North. They come down and have rental houses or vacation homes. They are like, “I’m here for a week. I need to get my air conditioning replaced. I have ten other companies that are coming out here afterward.” We failed on the front end by not being the last person there at the door. What would you say if they did want to compare prices? The emotion needs to be built in there long-term and being long distance away. What would you say to that client whenever they hit you with that right at the end of the conversation?
You have to find out who these people are and what is important to them. When a customer says to me, “You are getting multiple quotes,” this is a customer who is comparison-shopping because they think that they can. It’s because it’s what we do in life. We buy cars, appliances, electronics, groceries and clothing that way. We can buy everything by comparing things because all the value is in the thing. All the value of what we do as contractors, roofing, windows, siding, gutters, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, generators and all that is in the installation service and maintenance process. It’s part of the design too.
The value is not in the things. The value is in the impacts and results that you get. There’s very little that comes from the boxes of the thing. Only about 20% of that comes from the value. The impact that you are going to get comes from the thing and 70% is based on the contractor. I understand that. Most customers try to comparison-shop because they try and buy other things. Let me teach you how to buy and where value comes from Bill and Susan. I have a process that takes them through that.
In our Elevated Consumer Buying Experience, that’s what we do. We teach contractors how to teach customers how to buy and where the value comes from. You started by asking the questions about the load calculator. I’m going to start right there. I asked a room of people. I did it that day in EPIC. When Josh was in the room, I said, “How many of you do load calculations?” All the hands went up. I said, “How many of you are doing one in every single house you go to?” Most of their hands went down. I said, “Right there, I got you.” That’s one thing. You are putting out a flow hood or ductulator.
Bill and Susan, do yourself a favor. If you are going to go ahead and shop this around, by all means, do. An educated consumer is our best customer. Here are the things that you want to look for. Measure contractors this way. Give them a buyer’s guide and teach the customer how to buy. Set that bar so high that any other clown in town who comes in and plays the game at the lowest level is out. You can say, “Give me the last shot.” I’m not a fan of that because that’s manipulative a little bit to some extent.
Just being more human is a principle of life. It’s one of the fundamentals. Let's just be better humans. Click To TweetYou say, “If you want, you can give me your quote or I will come back. When you have done your due diligence, we can have a conversation.” Do these things. All this stuff is based on third-party stuff, ACCA, Energy Star, the Department of Energy, Building Performance Institute and National Comfort Institute. Russ and I teach what we call third-party credibility. It’s not my opinion. It’s math, facts, science and data.
Do we need to print that information and data out and give it to the client every time we do a job?
I would print it out. At the very least, if you are going to email it, you send it as a PDF. If you try and direct customers to websites with all good intentions to people, they never do it. They don’t have the time. If you put it in front of them, when they finally sit down and make the decision, it’s right there. It’s accessible. No matter what you think about generations and technology, even restaurants are trying to go towards QR codes. The only reason they went towards QR codes is because of the pandemic. By far, most restaurants still are putting a menu out in front of you. Why? It’s because all the information is there.
I can’t stand looking at it on my phone. Tersh’s better half had a question that’s on the same topic. She said, “Drew, what do you say are the top ways to build credibility and value to win them over from start to finish? How do you find our best ways to share that along the way or after?”
The process is what allows us to unfold. There’s a crescendo building. We start soft and easy with fact-finding questions and then we get into the deeper questions. We then get into surveying the whole house, keeping the customer engaged with us and educating them. Russ and I talked about building a position of trust. We are not building a relationship or making friends. You build a position of trust with the consumer because we both know this is a transaction. That’s why you are there. We both know it’s business.
We all call ourselves system consultants, comfort advisors, home comfort experts, design techs or whatever you are calling yourself but the customer knows you are a salesperson. We know that’s transactional base. The key is let’s forget about the transaction. Let’s have a conversation, “I’m going to give you some good information so you can make a good decision. It’s going to be in alignment with what you want. It’s all going to be in print. It’s completely transparent.”
You’ve got to make the decisions because we will say somewhere during the process, “It’s your home, family or bank account. You have to be happy with the choices that you make because you are the one who has to live with them and I don’t. Here’s the reality. I don’t care what you do, Bill and Susan, as long as you do it knowingly. I will be happy if you make a choice that you are happy with as long as you do it knowingly. Let’s get to work.”
The psychology behind building the position of trust is to take your agenda or your dog out of the hunt. Put your agenda aside and say, “I’m here to serve myself.” Most salespeople sell themselves out of more sales and customers who had the right of choice, which we learned in The Matrix movies, “It all comes down to choice.” I even teach that here. There’s a clip I use from The Matrix in my class about this. We embrace the customers to price things. It’s their sense of control and right to choose.
This information was super valuable. The site for Drew and Russ’ coaching program is FlowOdyssey.us. Is there anything that we did not touch on that you want to touch on quickly here, Drew?
I appreciate the opportunity. It’s good to work with you again. If you want to get a taste of what it is that Russ and I do, join EGIA Contractor University. We do live in-classroom training and virtual training. There are all kinds of videos being posted and released weekly with what we do and teach. I grew up in this industry. It has given me and my family everything. We are giving back because we can. We want to make an impact just like you want to make an impact.
The way to do that is to get out of your own way. Stop selling and start serving. Provide information in a way that people decide because I know that contractors are tuning in. You think you are getting a better result for your customer. You are giving them a better customer experience. You know you are doing the right things. I applaud the hard work that you and your team all put in, but sometimes you don’t get credit for it, meaning the customer is not buying from you. They are buying from somebody else for less but it’s because you have gotten in your way.
The problem is, the customer is getting cheated by themselves and they don’t even know it. We are not the only ones teaching this. Other people teach this in the world but we are the only ones doing it in the industry. Find a more human way to connect with people. When you do that, you will find you will get better results.
Speaking of assets and things, you had put out a video. I did put the video in the comments on Facebook and our YouTube page. The video was about how to make air tangible because as we all know, talking about airflow is something invisible. It’s very difficult to make that a tangible thing where people can understand it better. The video that Drew put out is on EGIA. It’s also on Flow Odyssey’s Facebook page as well. The one I added was from Flow Odyssey’s Facebook page. Check that out.
The EGIA Cracking the Code video is the one you are talking about. They hang out live for about a week. If you want to see the archive going forward, you have to join EGIA. We put those out free for a week.
A lot of this stuff gets posted initially in Contractor Connect. I believe it’s the Facebook group that EGIA has. CJ over at EGIA does a great job putting out valuable stuff and keeping the conversation going. Check those out. It’s a free Facebook page. There’s no membership or anything. You can join and have good conversations with good people. Drew, thank you very much. I appreciate you jumping on with us. I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
That sounds good. I appreciate you.
Important Links:
- Drew Cameron
- Episode – Overcoming Issues In Your Home Service Business With Ellen Rohr And Drew Cameron
- Russ Horrocks – YouTube, Past Episode
- Energy Design Systems
- Elite Software
- Manual J
- National Comfort Institute
- Buyology
- EGIA Contractor University
- YouTube – Service Business Mastery Podcast
- EGIA – Use your Tools to Show the Air Video
- Contractor Connect – Facebook
- Facebook – Flow Odyssey
About Drew Cameron
As the child of a father who operated an HVAC business, I got a front-row seat to the struggles, headaches, and heartaches that come with running one’s own operation. Growing up in the business with my siblings, we saw the challenges my father endured; The long hours, the missed family dinners, the relationships lost, all in support of wanting to best help his customers while also building a life for the family he loved.
