If you’re trying to grow a security or life safety business, working harder isn’t always the answer. More often, the real bottleneck is structure.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the roadmap for scaling a security business the right way. They cover how to think about growth vs. earnings, when to invest in people, why your tech stack matters, and how to build a sales engine that actually drives change.
This episode is a practical guide for owners who want to grow with intention instead of staying stuck in the same cycle.
In this episode, they discuss:
- Why you need to define your end goal before building your growth plan
- The difference between managing for growth, managing for earnings, and managing for enterprise value
- Why A-players create leverage that process alone never will
- How the right hires can accelerate growth across every department
- Why a unified tech stack improves visibility, efficiency, and customer experience
Whether you’re building for long-term growth, thinking about acquisitions, or trying to create a more scalable operation, this episode breaks down the practical decisions that matter most.
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
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You've got to have it mapped out. What is your end goal? Manage for growth or manage for earnings. You can't really do both at the same time very well. You've got to unfortunately do a lot of it in parallel. You can't really march through improving a business significantly if you don't have the right people.
Talent wins.
Talent wins, baby.
Growth forces change. You're not gonna change ever. If you don't force growth into your business, you're not gonna change. You're gonna stay the same.
Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven Ullman. I also have Colin Trimble with me, who is my co-host and my business partner. We run Alarm Masters by day and by nights and weekends, et cetera. We run this podcast because we want to help uh provide practical and tactical advice to help grow and scale your security or life safety business.
I think this may be our maybe our first or second podcast we've done where I'm not wearing a hat. And and people have referred to us as the hat bros. Yes, the hat guys. I get that a lot. Yeah. It's an accessory, but you know, it's a male accessory. I'm I'm fully embracing my uh lack of hair today so that all of our listeners can see you look good, who I really am, my authentic self, if you will. Um well, I'm excited to jump in. Um, I think it was something this podcast came out as a result of me being um a psychopath and re-listening to our other podcasts and thinking about gaps in areas where we could fill and provide value. And one thing that I I thought about is man, we talk a lot about you should do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, invest in these things, spend your time on these things. And and if I was an owner who was not doing these things and didn't have this playbook or this path developed, uh, it would be overwhelming. And it would be like, oh, okay, where do I do it? Where do I start? Like, what's the most important thing? And so the purpose of the episode today, I think, is a discussion around where should you invest your time and money? Like, what's your roadmap
to scale? That's really what it is, right? It's like, hey, what should you do that's gonna be the lowest hanging fruit? And also what should you do that should also that can also help you um scale? And it's this is kind of a funny thing. I'm gonna touch on AI for one second, which I think is interesting. Is all these companies like Claude and ChatGPT, they all are building these compute, these massive data centers, and they have to make a bet today on how much of this data center should we allocate towards training and making our product better. And how if so long-term, nothing gained today versus inference, which is basically the product that gets delivered to the customers and makes them more profitable. So it's an exchange of value now versus value later and balancing that to keep your customers. And I think there's some truth to that in the security industry as well, is you've got to balance a lot of investment decisions. And as an owner of a business or as a leader of a business, you've got to make decisions. That's basically what you and I do every single day is yeah, we're really out of a lot of the tactical stuff at this point. Now we are really spending time making decisions on strategic moves for the business and what's right. And we have kind of imperfect information a lot of times on how to do that. And so we rely on our gut. Um, and that does just come from experience. And so, what I want to do is I want to think through um and talk through like, hey, here's our plan and here's our here's how we think about everything. Because I think that in order to dictate a scale plan, you've got to have a long-term plan in mind. You've got to have it mapped out. And so I think an important thing to, and we don't have to camp out on this, but a really important thing when you're thinking about scaling your business is what is your end goal? Like if your end goal is to sell the business, you will do something different than if you want it, your end goal is to um keep the business. And I think actually, even a distinction of that is you don't actually have to decide if you want to sell your business at some point, but what you do have to decide is are you planning to sell your business within some short time frame? So if it's within three to five years, you're gonna do something very different than if you're thinking about selling it and potentially selling it in 10 years, right? I probably wouldn't do it like our plan, we're probably not gonna do anything different in 10, like 10 years. We're planning to we're trying to build enduring businesses. That's what we really want to do, but we also want our business to be able to be sold at any point. Not that we have plans to do that, but we think it's a healthy business, but we don't have plans to sell the next three years. And so our plan is a little longer term than somebody that's um planning to sell in three years. Is that is that tracking? Would you agree with that?
Yeah, there are different roadmaps or playbooks if you are thinking about, you know, let's say you are 60 years old, you're thinking about retirement, and you're like, you know, I could be done in the next few years, I can feel good about that. But you know that there is a gap, you know, point A to point B that you need to traverse to be to kind of maximize your value if you are gonna sell in the next few years. So, what's that playbook is very different than, hey, I'm 43 and I'd love to just run this for a couple more decades and continue to grow and scale, but you're operating at a different pace. Um, you might think about inorganic growth like acquisitions, you might think about that differently also. Yeah. So yeah, it's not, it's not just one, you know, one size fits all.
Yeah. No, I agree. And I think just we're gonna spend the time on the folks that are like us that don't have immediate plans to sell their business. And so that's really who this episode is targeted for. If you're somebody that's looking to sell in the next one to three years, um, I don't have a great answer for you, other than I would probably be really focused on um inorganic. If you've struggled to grow organically and you're kind of at this wall, you're not gonna solve it probably in the next one to three years. So I would say, or you're not gonna get the velocity that you really want to get.
Yeah.
So I would probably focus on inorganic and I would be trying to acquire as many businesses within your market that you can roll into your business to get some size and scale. And then I would be hyper focused on your team, building out really quality people in the team so that there's a lack of a key man risk because that's gonna really devalue your business. If you do all of it, your business is gonna be worth less than if you have people that do all of it. And then the last thing I would focus on is cutting costs out of the business that you can, like all your personal expenses, get that out of your business. I would see how you can reduce your software spend. Don't try to implement a brand new ERP, that's not gonna drive value for you in the next one to three years. So, like I would be really focused on investing in your team and investing in in organic acquisition and trying to cut out costs. So that's just as a just as to touch on that, because I think if that's if that's your goal, that's what I would focus on.
Yeah. Uh my my little ad to that is um manage for growth or manage for earnings. You can't really do both at the same time very well. And so if you have a short timeline, you need to be managing for earnings. Yeah. Um, and especially in your last 12 months, like your TTM, like you you need to be heavily focused on showing real, not like you know, you fired everybody now, your earnings look pretty. Like that's that's not gonna fly. Um, but that's a different play to run than if you do have a much longer time frame, you're focused on growing. And yes, of course, like we love earnings, they're delicious, but you know, it's not the core focus, like if you're more so in growth mode. And we're gonna talk more about a playbook and a path that's about kind of growing and scaling over a longer period.
Yeah, I will say uh one thing. If you are looking to sell in the next one, like 12 to 24 months, you're actually not managing to growth or to earnings, you're managing to enterprise value. So you're trying to figure out what are the levers that are gonna make my business more valuable and not that earnings is obviously the most important thing, but also like key man risk is huge, right? Like you've got to solve for that before you go sell your business. Like, please go solve for that before you sell your business. And that would be something that maybe somebody that's managing for earnings maybe wouldn't try to be solving for. So anyway, yeah, great point and great perspective on that. So, yeah, let's talk to these folks that have got like in building enduring businesses, building businesses they're trying to grow. So if your goal is to have the most valuable business you can have, you've got to think about the type of business you want to be. Um, and you've got to think about how you want to grow. The biggest companies that are out there that are the most successful are doing both organic, meaning just sales, marketing, day-to-day growth, and inorganic, which is acquisitions. So if you have said, I don't want to do inorganic, I don't want to do acquisitions, just know that it is gonna be significantly harder for you to scale, not impossible. It is gonna go dramatically slower than than your scale, but it'll be likely less risky. So there is some trade-offs, right? But I would say that I am much more specialized in organic than inorganic. I would say you are very specialized in inorganic. That's why there's a you know, beautiful match here between us, beautiful marriage, if you will. But uh I would say that if you I would say that it's very even if I was running and I would say I'm really good at organic scale, it would be hard. It'd be hard to hit our goals that we want to hit on an organic loan. It would be maybe impossible. Um, and so I think you need to open your mind around, hey, what is my real goal here and what's my risk tolerance? So we're gonna make some assumptions here that um this is mostly gonna be focused on organic growth and what you can control within your own business because we're not gonna convince you to do inorganic if you don't want to. And we really don't want to convince you. You need to be confident in a strategy and really have that dialed in. So we're not gonna spend a lot of time. Go ahead.
I I would say uh we could maybe look back and say that we started to acquire too early because we probably could have gone through something like this playbook and been more well positioned to execute acquisitions healthier more methodically, if some of these things we're gonna talk about were already really, really strong. Whereas we were kind of building the plane as we were flying it to a degree. Um so that's a great point. I I think if you are acquisition curious, get some of these things more tight and solid and and uh as like a core foundation of your business before if you have a long time frame. It's like, hey, let's be patient. Um we just frankly, there was a couple good deals that you know, off-market came across our desk and we acted on them. Um, and then I think also part of Alarm Masters playbook was inherently to acquire cross-el-ups, you know, the whole the whole play there. Um, but there is wisdom in getting a little more solid in core areas before doing that.
Yeah, I think that's a I think that's a really great point. It actually worked out, obviously, for us, but it was a little, there's some nuance to it. Like it was really beneficial that we did that for we we closed on our first acquisition within six months of buying Alarm Masters, which I would say was way too soon for somebody buying a business. If you're buying a new platform and this is your first time in the industry, probably buying another one in six months, not the best idea. It actually worked out really well for us because our downside risk was really protected due to the deal structure. And it gave us a lot of like it opened our eyes to holy crap, if we're doing this really small deal and this is how hard it is, to do a lot of bigger deals is gonna be like five X more painful. So there was a lot of benefit to that, but your point is really well taken. And I think that's where we should focus on is hey, where are you trying to grow? So I'm always trying to think about how do I get the lowest acquisition cost possible? And I'm talking about organic customer acquisition. How do I keep my customer acquisition cost as low as possible? Yeah, right. So again, I'm pivoting away from an inorganic. You should do that at some point, probably. Let's focus on the organic. And so for me, I'm thinking about how do we get the lowest customer acquisition cost? And how do we get the the best, how do we, how are we the most capital efficient with that revenue dollar, right? So how do we, it's in layman's terms, like how do I get a customer for the cheapest, most repeatable way? And how do I execute that project in a way that is gonna squeeze out the most number of cash flow to me at the end of the project as possible? And and that's that is a lot because you're talking about the entire life cycle. Sounds
sounds simple.
Uh right. And then and then what do I do with that uh cash flow dollar? Yeah.
Yeah, right. And so so the way that I think about this is I want to run as many things in parallel that I can. Many business owners make the mistake of I want to run growth projects in my business in sequential order. All right, I'm gonna try to nail marketing, then I'm gonna focus on sales, then I'm gonna focus on administrative efficiency, then I'm gonna focus on building that technician sales commission program that I've been trying to build forever, and then I'm gonna build a training facility in my office so my techs can get smarter and I can get quicker on jobs. And then you've got to unfortunately do a lot of this in parallel and it and know that you're not gonna get to this product that's a hundred percent immediately. So, what you're really trying to do is how do I get to a minimum viable product as quick as possible so I can test and retest and build. And you're basically trying to do this in iterations, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Sure.
Right? Like trying to say I'm gonna get to a perfect income complete product is in sequential order.
There's a few things that have a real order of operations to them, though. And some of the some of the detail that we're about to dive into, you maybe you do like the first or second part of it, you already feel really good about. So you can kind of skip and and you know, think about the the elements beyond that. Um we're going to you you can't really march through improving the business significantly if you don't have the right people. Talent wins.
Talent wins, baby. It's your foundation, dude. And and and we've talked about this on the pod. And I'm sure if you're listening to this, you probably haven't listened to every single pod. I hope you do, but you probably haven't. Yeah, please, and and if you could like and subscribe while we're talking about it. Newsletter, all of it, give it to you. Yeah. We yeah. Um anyway, but you're bringing up a really great point, which is um we and again, we tried early on to hire, we tried to throw process at low quality talent to make bridge the gap. And what we realized is that's not how it works. You get high quality talented people that perform and you layer process on top and you unlock even more efficiency and capacity out of that individual. And so we didn't think that way. We thought hire a person that's really should be paid $100,000, pay them $50,000, and let's throw process at them and we'll bridge that gap. And it's like, no, you want to hire a $100,000 person, throw process to them, and they actually are doing two jobs or three jobs. That's that's the way to look at it. And so I think you're right. As you hear us talking, the first thing that I would do is go get people that are not good, that are great, that are needle movers in your business that you all like have a ownership mentality. I was talking to our, yeah, this is hilarious. I didn't tell you this, but I was talking to uh our um our VP of sales, Connor. I was chatting with him about all of our like we're going to IC West this week. And he was saying, Man, you know, I was he was I let him he book his flights and he's expensing them on the company, obviously. He said, you know, working for other companies in the past, uh I've always been like, I don't care. Like if this seat's 150 bucks and this one's, you know, 350 bucks, like I'm gonna pick the more expensive one because I want to be comfortable. And he goes, for the first time, I thought, dang, like this feels like my money. Like, I don't want to go buy the 350. So I booked the $150 middle seat in the back because I wanted to be, you know, efficient. And he was just observing this real time with me that like he feels this ownership. And I was like, dang, that's a microcosm of what I want every employee to feel. I want them to feel like I'm these are my dollars. And it is, I we try to share this with our employees all the time. Hey, there's a pot of money that's available, and we're gonna share it. Everybody in this business, it's not just gonna be me. Hopefully, me, I'm gonna be the last person that's gonna get the money out of the pot, just to be clear, not the first. And and there's this pot of money. And so if there's more money available in this pot, then you get more money. So if you're the only one putting money in, that's not gonna be enough. You're gonna have to make sure that your team and your peers also doing it. So, anyway, ownership mentality and really good quality people. And if you're settling for a B player, you should always be trying to get to an A player. Yep. And I think that we talk to owners all the time, like, yeah, I've got he's okay. You know, he's yeah, he's good enough.
Sales guy, sales guy, you know, he's just kind of more of an order taker. Yeah, he takes things off my plate. Yeah. Yeah, we hear that a lot. No, you want I couldn't we could not grow without that person. They've built better processes than I came up with. They're motivating their team, they're managing to KPIs, they're being dynamic within a sales process. They're coming up with new go-to-market ideas. Like if that's not flowing out of you, and I just use sales as an example, yeah. Then you need to be thinking about leveling up your team. And yeah, there is the element of can you take someone who is a B player and help them raise their game?
Like certain people can't be the hardest question.
It is like some people have the potential.
Yeah.
So then it's do they have the potential? And if they do, do I have the time and the ability myself or someone on the team to help them upskill? Both of those might be no. So um, yeah, those are we could actually spend probably an entire episode on how to level up your team and how to how to identify we need to cut bait. Yeah, you know, and so that's um so I would say zoom out. All of these things we're about to talk about are almost pointless if you don't have a talented team that you can trust and that you believe are the right people to go to the next two or three levels.
I a thousand percent agree. And I would also say without fail, this has proven to be true for us. I'd rather pay two employees, I'd rather have one employee that's freaking phenomenal than two employees that are okay. And it it even may not seem intuitive. Like, here's a crazy thing. We've done this and tested it and it has worked. We've had two employees that have both been, let's just say in sales and they're making half a million dollars each a year and and like they're selling half a million dollars each. We've got another guy that's doing, you know, a million bucks a year, let's just say, and you're thinking, okay, well, I've got these other two guys. If I get rid of them and I just pay that guy more, like it's not like he's gonna give me another two million. You would be surprised if you pay that other person more and you enable and give them the investments to unlock them. How much and for us, every time it is returned way more than the B players, every single time. So, point well taken. I a lot of these things can be done in parallel. The first thing is you got to take a hard look at your team. We man, I'm so
we're so blessed with our team, and and we're like, there's so many people we've invested in and spent a lot of time and uh money investing in them. So you gotta have a really fantastic team. This next one I think is is controversial, but it's paid off for us in a huge way is technology um and a unified platform. We talk about this so often, and I get I I literally quite literally talk to listeners every single week. And one of the first things I hear is what technology stack are you using? I tried Salesforce, I tried HubSpot, I got HubSpot out here. I don't really and they just describe this. Oh, I've got Sedona, I've got whatever, and it's like, man, I've got an industry solution, and it's like it just doesn't do all the things you need it to do. And you don't necessarily have to be on a singular platform, but I would tell you you should try your best, and you should really try to invest and get your data, customer data, all in one place.
Yeah, I I would say explain layman's terms for you know 30, 45 seconds on what a real unified platform. What do you mean by that?
Yeah, so we we have chosen to be on Salesforce. That's not the only platform. It's it's truly not. There are a lot of great platforms out there. We are just the most familiar with Salesforce, given my context and background there. Um, and it has paid off for us in a humongous way. For me, I think of it as a customer 360, which is a marketing term from Salesforce, which is basically you're you have multiple touch points for a customer. They come in through the website. You've got cases and tickets that come in, customer service issues that come in, that's a touch point. You've got a sales guy that's going out, that's a touch point. You've got technicians that are going out, that's a touch point. They're getting invoices, that's a touch point. You're doing company announcements, that's a touch point. I'm trying to get all of my customer information in a single place. Every phone call, every email, every text message, every meeting, every case, every opportunity, every invoice, credit memo. Every time they're on the website, everything single platform. And the reason is, is it there's actually some long-term reason we we were not going to get onto this path. But the main reason is if you are thinking about driving AI in your business, this is going to be the single biggest uh reward for your investment that you could ever make.
Well, I will rephrase that as if you're going to use like new emerging technologies, trying to plop them on top of a bunch of disparate systems that don't talk to each other, that don't have any sort of standards is going to be an absolute disaster.
It's going to be really hard and it's going to constrain you. So if I were doing this, I would be hiring great people and building great technology and investing in a lot. Like whatever the number that you are thinking in your head, double that number. Like whatever you're thinking, B B triple. B triple it. We were told when we first bottled our masters, somebody said to us, hey, in your first year, do not change the technology. Don't do it. And I think that's a really wise thing. We did not do that. We immediately started working on changing our technology. And I am so glad that we did. It is the single biggest differentiator or differentiator in the future and now and in the future for us. And it has given us better customer interactions. It's given me better available data to make good decisions. It's made our team significantly more efficient and it's future-proofed us. And you need to spend time on this. And you've got to think critically about what do I want and what is my end state? How open is this platform? The biggest thing I would say is find a platform that is open, like has very clean, very open APIs, even if you have no idea what to do with them. Salesforce is a platform like that. ServiceNow has a platform like that. HubSpot has a platform like that. Zoho One has a platform like that. Um Service Titan has some of that. So there is a lot of platforms. Yeah, there's some platforms out there that have that are that are very open. So you don't have to pick but to pick the one.
I'm not gonna recommend Service Titan to anyone in this industry.
Just yeah, it would be tough. I mean, there's I think it I think they made it there, but I yeah, but I I would say it's probably not the perfect fit yet for this physical security and fire life safety industry. But anyway, so I don't want to spend an amazing amazing amount of time on technology, but the technology is like if your people are the foundation, this is the framing of your house. This is the structure of your house because it impacts everything. You should spend the time on it because you can drive better experiences for your customers, make better decisions, and be more efficient.
Yes. The my two additions, and then we'll move on, is um this is a top-down thing. So the last thing, please don't go spend time and money on it and then not adopt it. And guess what? Adoption starts with you. Yeah, it's not, oh, I technology for my team. No, it starts with you, Mr. and Mrs. Owner, starts with the core leadership team, so that you can say, hey, follow me. I'm using this. We're all gonna be adopting it together in unison. Unified platform, unified team, great. Um, and then
the other thing I would say is don't lose sight of the fact that you're still like operating a business and like the platform isn't gonna like be this silver bullet that magically fixes other problems inherently. Yeah. I think sometimes we're like, look, I am look, we did this cool tech thing, and now like yeah, that's probably gonna fix these. Uh like make sure you're realistic about what it is and is not.
Yeah. It's a really good point. Um, I agree with you on that a hundred percent. Um, so we've talked about people, we've talked about technology. These are the two things I would start with. Right now, get started on it. The third thing um is gonna be it's probably not super surprising to anybody, but it's related to sales and growth. And you've kind of had to pick a little bit of a path here. You have to, and this has a little bit to do with your, it's a little personalized to your business, kind of context specific. Customer makes it you could spend money on technician development, getting some stuff going on in your operations department, different things that you may want to do to do improvement in your operations department. You may do some things in your service department. That would be an area we talk a lot about service. I love service. Um, that in spending time and money trying to make your service department better. You could spend some time on the marketing thing, spending a ton of money on PPC, SEO, paid ads. We talked about starting SEO early. You should. That is an option. There's a lot of paths you could go down. This is really where you can start to do things in parallel. Once you have a really good foundation of people and technology, you can start running some of these other things in parallel and make little bets, take your pot of chips and kind of make some bets. So you don't have to pick a singular thing here. This is where you kind of have the branch to do multiple things. With that being said, I personally think the biggest driver for your business, and this is a controversial take because a lot of folks say, hey, uh, I can't scale. I gotta fix all my operational stuff. I I can't don't don't give me more like we hear this from people. It's crazy. It's like, no, I can't grow, I can't take on any more projects right now. We're so busy, we're not even executing on them perfectly. It's like, hey, that's a perspective. I I don't I I I don't share it. Like to me, growth.
We would rather sell and and figure out the operational side than endlessly stay in this place of, oh, I just can't take on more.
Growth forces change. You you you're not gonna change ever. If you don't force growth into your business, you're not gonna change. You're gonna stay the same. So, and if you're listening to this podcast, you're you you wanna change, you wanna grow, you wanna be better, right? So, like, and so do I. And we, it's not that we have the whole thing figured out. We're not operating a billion-dollar security company. So it's not like we have it figured out 100%. Not yes, yeah, right. Um, so our path would be focus on sales. And it wouldn't just be hiring salespeople, yes, you should do that. It would also be dialing your in dialing in your incentive plan, your tech, your, your support stack for your sales team, helping them do the thing. So, like for me, it would be so here's a very tangible place I would start. I would create and invest in a segmented sales strategy. Everybody we talk to is a single sales guy that's responsible for their leads, for their quotes, for their calendar. They're a maverick, they run on their own. They do everything. I would immediately try to fix that problem by hiring some inside salespeople, take a dedicated person that all they do is quoting. That's it. That's all they do. I would figure out how to use that technology to make that quoting process as seamless and efficient and quick and painless as possible for that estimator or designer, whatever you want to call them. And then I would find somebody that can set appointments for your sales team.
Yes.
And what is your go-to-market strategy? How are they going that don't just Google manufacturing businesses and try to call, like have a little bit of a path and a little bit of an idea of who is the customer? We've talked about this before. Identify your ideal client profile, go do coffee drops with your existing customers, easy place to start. Um, so I would start with segmented sales strategy. Do you have a different take on that?
No, I don't. But if you do that, your salesperson that you maybe already have is a generalist. And because you are sp you're really specializing, what you need is a salesperson who can freaking sail. Who can sail? Maybe they can sail.
I'm sailing. What about modern what a sales boat was?
Uh a sales boat. That's great. Um, there's a lot of metaphors happening. Yeah. Um, we're just gonna sail through this podcast. Uh so go in kangaroo mode, you know? Uh so what I'm trying to say is that if you're gonna have segmented sales, you're gonna have an estimator, you're gonna have an appointment setter, the salesperson being this generalist who used to do it all, maybe they actually are really talented at selling, but if not, that's you're probably gonna have to move on. You're probably gonna have to level up and put someone in that seat who is a closer. Yeah. That's really what I wanted to say. So um if you if you're gonna get granular within that process segmented out, that means you need specialists in each. And what you currently have is like a dude named Jack, and Jack is awesome, and you know, you like to golf together, and that's super cool. And he may not be the best closer. He may be more of an order taker, and you're gonna have to make a hard decision and give him a nice severance.
Yeah. Segmented sales strategy, that's exactly where I would start. And and what's gonna happen is that's gonna open your mind to every department that you have. So you're gonna start to realize once you do this exercise of thinking critically and planning and fixing your sales department, you're gonna start to realize some kind of pattern matching between other departments and how you can fix how do you drive more leads in your sales service department. We talked about that in the episode a couple weeks ago, which yeah, your service department should be a sales department. And we could we could spend a lot more time on that. But anyway, so that's the areas that I would start. I would really build that segmented sales strategy. And I think that that's the lowest hanging fruit because once you start forcing growth, it's gonna force change, right? So it's like once you start forcing growth, and honestly, let me just say this: if you're like, hey, where do I find leads? Just start with your existing customers. Just every customer you've ever done a service call for, or you monitor, or you've provided serve, like you have thousands of customers that you have given you dollars, probably. Go out and talk to them. That's the first place I'd start. Hire a person that's gonna go set appointments for them. International teams are a great use for that. Excellent. They do not have to be a body here locally. And a person that can do estimation for you again can be an international team member. And those are two like lower cost ways to achieve this rather than hiring physical local employees. And you will find that you're going to be your pipeline is gonna be filling up. And so once you have the people and you got the foundation, you've got the structure with the the technology, then you can start filling out the rooms in the house. For us, we would recommend the the sales approach. And really, I think that like you're gonna start to see where you can start to do some of these things in other departments.
Well, the the natural, no, but the natural progression of that is if you start growing, what's gonna change is you're gonna have to probably
go now look at ops and you're gonna have to think about scaling your technician's team, upskilling them, hiring better talent, having a having more of a pipeline. That's something we've been working on, to try to have a better pipeline of talent. It's like, hey, I know we we've met with three or four great people recently. We're not quite ready for them, and we've told them that, but they know that we're growing. And so when we reach out six weeks from now, three months from now, they're not surprised. Like, oh, cool, you're ready. Okay, like I I do I like you guys. So always trying to work through having a bench. Um, so I think that's a natural progression of increasing sales and that velocity is now turning your attention to the tech side.
I want to close on one thing, and this is an idea I had. Steven didn't didn't like this idea, but I thought it was worth bringing up on this podcast episode is you need to invest in culture as well for your employees. Um, like as an example, we have a ping pong table in our office, and uh not a lot of people play ping pong before, and now a lot of people play ping pong, and we play a lot of fast games, and that ping pong table also happens to be our conference table. They make those, by the way. You should look at that. We also do a lot of team building stuff. We also uh we do a lot of things where we're engaging with our employees as much as possible and trying to uh uh spend time uh creating culture and um making sure that our team feels seen and heard, and we think that that's an investment that's worth making. And that you're like, yeah, I mean we'd get what to get together for top golf once a year. It's like, hey, I would maybe spend if you have limited dollars, I would maybe try to do a whole bunch of things like quarterly or even bi-monthly and and make them less expensive, but just like team engagement. I think uh A players around A players, they they make each other better, and also it it exposes the B and C players in your organization quicker. And I think that investing in your people, taking them on the conference trips, like going to IC West, bringing people to those things, like I think that that's good. Like spending time with folks in the margins of life, I think is a is a great investment as well. So I thought that was a great idea.
Um, I know you don't love it, but that was my idea for everyone listening. Yeah, no one will believe you. No one will believe me.
Um what's the what's the homework, Colin? Yeah, the homework is get the foundation started, take a hard look at your departments and figure out who the B and C players are. And even if you're not ready to hire an A player, see what you could do without the B players. Like start making some decisions on that. And even if you're growing, you will figure it out. Like that is something that's kind of universally true, is like if you own a business and you care, you're gonna figure it out. You've had you you've had uh situations you've had to work through before. Start thinking about your technology roadmap. Think about the end in mind. What data would help you make better decisions and what processes are slowing you down today and remap those out and then go talk to software providers with those problems and watch a ton of demos. And if you go sit through two of these and you make a decision, you did it wrong. You should probably be talking and looking at 12 to 15 different software providers. Do those things and you're gonna be in a much better place. So I know this is a lot of information. We really wanted to fill in the gaps of like, here's how Colin and Steven prioritize some things. Um, if you like what you heard, like and subscribe, hit us up. We've got a really great newsletter that kind of like summarizes all this stuff that I think is great because we spend time on it. Um but tell your friends, we appreciate it. Thanks.
