Rebecca and Lon build out a coaching empire that takes full use of the manuals and techniques they developed building successful home service companies.
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[Seaside Plumbing Ad]
Rick:
Told you, Brian.
Brian:
Told me what?
Rick:
This is part two of last week’s episode.
Brian:
Oh, yeah. And it was getting good.
Rick:
If you missed it, go back and listen to part one first. Take it away, fellas.
Rebecca Cassel:
Yeah, so, Lon, as I said, he was my business partner, and it was funny. I would say, “That sometimes you really like your business partners and sometimes you don’t.” And I think Lon and I went through the, hey, I don’t like you very much, but we really respect each other. We had very different strengths and weaknesses. I am very operational, strategic, and accounting. He was sales and marketing and relational. And so the combination was pretty fierce.
And he called me one day and said, “Hey, we’re going to start an organization. I just got invited to join a group of investors in St. Louis to start an organization that will help more contractors.” And he said, “We’re going to actually branch out of just doing HVAC. I think we’re going to do plumbing and maybe eventually electrical.” I go, “Wow, that’s really exciting.” He goes, “I’m moving to St. Louis, so I’ll keep in touch with what’s going on.”
I was living in North Carolina, and he was living in Illinois at the time. And I thought, wow, what a cool thing. I go, “Well, if I can be of help, obviously I’m here doing it, writing operations manuals or procedures, or obviously I’d love to be a client. So when you get this all up and going, that’ll be exciting.” About three months later, he called me, and he said, “Hey, I think you should be a part of this.”
And I was like, “What do you mean? I’m running an HVAC business in a completely different state.” And again, before all the technology where you could do everything remote, he goes, “I think what we’re going to do is going to really change the industry dramatically, and I know you would want to be a part of that.” And he said, “Why don’t you find a way to develop our comfort advisor into the general manager, and let’s get this going to where maybe you could come be a part of this operationally.”
Stephen Semple:
And which business was this, Rebecca?
Rebecca Cassel:
This was Success Group International.
Stephen Semple:
This was Success Group, okay.
Rebecca Cassel:
Yes. At the time we had an umbrella name called BenVest, but it’s what became, we started Plumber Success first, but it was Success Group International. And so I went in and talked with some of the other founders about what we’re going to do, the CEO, Jim Abrams and Lon was already employed, and I got to meet Patty Myers, who is their VP of Finance, and I ended up being the fourth employee. We started in St. Louis and said, “Hey, we’re going to build an organization that helps home services be successful. We’re going to impact lives by helping these business owners become more successful.”
Stephen Semple:
So I want to step back and cover just a couple of other things. It’s amazing you had the opportunity to work with Jim so closely, with Jim Abrams. And anybody in the home services or the marketing space knows that name, like a famous, famous guy. So you had a chance to learn a lot from him, but you also had a chance to learn a lot from another marketing person who has a lot of fame in the home services space because I believe it was when you and Lon went to see Roy Williams, it was about one hour, wasn’t it?
Rebecca Cassel:
It was. So what happened, Jim Abrams and John Young were partners. Lon was an original investor. And so as a fourth employee, Patty always felt like we were founders too.
Stephen Semple:
Hey, according to this interview, we’ll take out the felt like, you were founders. We’re going to edit that.
Rebecca Cassel:
And we’ll edit this part too. But it wasn’t at the moment that we started the business. So I became, and not by marriage, by the way, I was my own coder, and then Lon and I get married. We’ll edit all that little piece out. So, yeah, I had the wonderful opportunity to learn from John. Yeah, John was fantastic marketer, really great at direct mail. And as we grew helping contractors, we did plumbing, we did HVAC, we did electrical, and we did roofing.
Some of our plumbing members said, “We’d really like to have national advertising, and we’d really like to have a national-looking truck.” And we started to kind of play around with this concept of having a national brand. And John Young was really excited about that because that made some of the marketing techniques and strategies easier when you’re doing it just for one brand, right? And I do remember in the conference room, one of our attorneys said, “Hey, this kind of starting to feel like a franchise here, so if you guys are going to do this, you probably need to form a franchise.” And that’s kind of how Benjamin Franklin, The Punctual Plumber was born, is that our members were asking for this national brand, this national advertising, this ability to do that. And so we started with Benjamin Franklin, but The Punctual Plumber, I believe was actually coining by Rory Williams.
I mean, John was looking for unique selling propositions and ways to get our message out and got introduced to Rory’s just whole thought process on building market share and brand awareness. And in our space, no one had ever really done that before. There weren’t contractors that were building brands.
You would go to the Yellow Pages and look for somebody, but you weren’t hearing them on the radio or seeing them on TV at that point in time. And so I know John was coming back all excited and talking about Broca’s area of the brain and all these… and iambic pentameters and all these things we had to do as a result of him meeting with Roy. So Benjamin Franklin, The Punctual Plumber, that rhyming that came out of some of those meetings with Roy. And so we started first with Benjamin Franklin and then decided to also then do the HVAC franchise. It was one hour heating and air conditioning, always on time, or you don’t pay a dime.
Stephen Semple:
Yep. Another one.
Rebecca Cassel:
Mr. Sparky Electric came from Patrick Kennedy who was our partner on the electrician success side and had a wonderful brand, and we began franchising with his brand. And so that became kind of our next generation of portfolio companies that kind of came from Success Group International.
Stephen Semple:
Which were look powerhouses. I didn’t realize, it’s funny how many times I’ve heard the story because being a partner with Roy and hanging out with Roy, I never realized that Benjamin, Franklin Plumbing was the first one. I had always thought it was One Hour, then Ben Franklin and then Sparky. So thank you for educating me on it. I’ve had the order wrong this entire time. And it’s funny, now that you say it, there’s certain conversations that I think back to and I go, “Oh, okay. There’s a couple of things now that make more sense that that would actually have been the order.” That’s cool.
But one of the things I want people to also understand is willingness to do some things that are really out there, and the successes come from that. And there was one story you shared about the newspaper ad. Now I know this is going back a little bit, but it also speaks to when something happens, and if it’s different, it has a power to it. And you know the ad I’m talking about, I don’t have to give anything away here.
Rebecca Cassel:
It annoyed me for a really long time, and it’s now funny.
Stephen Semple:
At the time, it really wasn’t.
Rebecca Cassel:
Yeah, at the time that Lon and I were business partners, and he said, Look, I’m going to give you a couple different newspaper ads. We’re going to try some direct mail, but I’m going to tell you right now, these ads are going to probably get you 30 to 40 leads.” And I was like, “No way. Come on, really?” And he goes, “Yep.” He goes, “They’re written in a specific way.” They were written by John Young actually. And so there’s a newspaper ad that he sent to me, and it said, the headline was, “How to buy a heating and air conditioning system for as little as 13.99 a week.” So that was the headline. And John always had this theory that you need to put a picture of a person and give them a cool title underneath so that people like to look at other people’s faces. And it wasn’t just all copy.
And so we put it into the newspaper in Winston-Salem, and I don’t know if I didn’t proof it right or if just they thought it was funny or if they were messing with me a little bit because I wasn’t exactly well received in the good old boys contracting network in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the time. So the ad came out, and I was supposed to have my picture with queen of comfort underneath of it, and instead of it, it had 13.99 a week under my name. So we were getting phone calls of, “Yeah, I like the girl in the ad for 13.99 a week.” I was so embarrassed, and I thought it was horrible. Of course, when I talked to Lon, he goes, “That’s awesome. Keep doing it that way. You’ll get so much attention from it.” And I was like, “Are you serious? This is horrible. This is just demeaning.” So anyway, we did correct it, and eventually I became the queen of comfort. But it was a fun story to tell that it got lots of attention for 13.99 a week.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And the interesting thing is sometimes it was a mistake, but sometimes these mistakes actually, as you say, “Catch a lot of attention.” And when you shared that with me, I was like, “Man, I could feel your discomfort,” but at the same time, it’s sort of one of those ones proofread the ads a little more carefully. So you’re now at Success Group International. You’ve also been doing the things with the brand, so you’ve got a franchise going on. You’ve also got the training systems, which frankly lend well to a franchise, because building a brand, and you’ve already got systems and operations. Well, that’s natural for a really successful franchise. You guys build that up, it’s doing amazing. And then what happens?
Rebecca Cassel:
Yeah, so the whole thought was, hey, we’ll get him ready here at SGI and then those that would want to convert to franchise would. And then eventually we started acquiring and having company-owned franchises. And so I had the opportunity through my career to always progress. I got to be the president of the franchise of operations, and then I also got to be the president of all of our retail operations. And we were acquiring companies all throughout the US and in Canada, which ended up to be about $180 million in HVAC, plumbing and electrical revenue. And so-
Stephen Semple:
When 180 million was a few dollars more than today.
Rebecca Cassel:
Yeah. Yeah. This would’ve been ’08, ’09. Yeah. And so it was exciting because I got to be back more in of a operating. I was operating then the helping contractors and franchising contractors. And then back in my retail experience, it was like back in the trenches of remembering what technicians are supposed to do in the home, and how do we answer the phone, and where are the market, right? So it was really exciting to be able to do that. And then in 2010, our CEO and board decided that it was time for us to sell, and we ended up selling to Direct Energy all of the things that we had built through Clockwork Cloud services.
Stephen Semple:
So it was the franchise, it was the branding, it was the systems, it was everything?
Rebecca Cassel:
It was.
Stephen Semple:
And then there’s a interesting twist in this story, because this story’s not over.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Empire Builders Ad}
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Rebecca Cassel:
I look back and go, “Gosh, if I would’ve made any different decision any point in my life, I would definitely not be sitting here talking to you today.” So when we sold in 2010, some of the executive team wanted to retire, some wanted do other things, then I thought, you know what? I want to stay. I’ve never worked for a $36 billion organization before. I liked a lot of the people that were there. I thought maybe I could learn some things. And so I decided to stay on as an employee of Direct Energy. And I was responsible for the training, the group buying our software at the time called Successware, and then also Success Group International.
It was a great run, but I could also tell that Direct Energy, their focus really wanted to be on the franchisees and really figuring out that brand with their energy play. And so I was kind of really concerned and questioned what’s the direction that they’re going to do with Success Group International. I was going to happen to SGI. Then as an entrepreneur, I was kind of having that entrepreneur itching in and my husband and I, we ended up going in 2013 and buying another heating and air conditioning business. And by the way, my husband is now a Lon Cassel so that’s a whole other podcast even.
Lon and I, business partners did end up getting married, but we decided to be operators again in 2013, and then an opportunity kind of fell on my lap, and I was at the right place at the right time at Direct Energy. My boss came to me at the time and said, “Hey, we’re not really sure that Success Group International really fits with our long-term play. Would you and Lon like to buy it back?” And I about fell over.
Dave Young:
Right because they were struggling with the whole fact that you could kind of have all the systems and things without a franchise. So I think they were struggling with, well, how do we position these two things. Like in your mind and my mind, they don’t compete. But in their mind, they were kind of competing, but they also knew that there was a lot of value in that. So they approached you and saying, “Hey, do you want to buy it back?”
Rebecca Cassel:
Yeah. And I said, “I’m surprised that you would sell it.” That was exactly the words that came out of my mouth. And they go, “We think if we unsell it, because we’d sell it to you and Lon, and we think you’ll help us figure out the best way to be partners as we unravel all this because there’s a lot of overlap between-
Stephen Semple:
Oh, gosh.
Rebecca Cassel:
Service [inaudible 00:16:28] and I mean one big accounting team and one big HR, right?
Stephen Semple:
Right, I hadn’t even thought about that.
Rebecca Cassel:
We had to figure out, it took us two and a half years of transition to just be independent. But we decided, hey, this is how we’re going to do it. I help work through that and figure that out. Many, many people on the DE team that helped with that. For me, I wouldn’t probably have the opportunity if it wasn’t for Dan Kipp and maybe Scott Boose, the guys at Direct Energy at the time who really said, “We’re going to figure this out because it’s the right thing to do for us and it’s the right thing to do for you.”
So in April of 2014, and it’s so weird that it was here in Dallas, we actually had our expo in Dallas and we were headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. I got to announce, “Hey, we’re independent and Lon and I are going to continue to grow SGI and focus on the independent contractor.” I also invited several of our members to become owners with us. I wanted other members to have the opportunity to influence who wanted to get back. And so people like Jimmy Dale and Gus Antos and Tim Bolden, who are all still members today, were instrumental in helping put together this group that is still SGI slash CertainPath today.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Here’s the part that I find, and I’ll go back and recap in a second, but here’s one of the things I also find that really speaks to the value of the service, that what’s now CertainPath today delivers. Is you knew the value in all of these things, and you knew the time it would take because you had a choice. At that point you could have said, “No, we’re not going to buy it. We’re going to rebuild all this stuff,” and you didn’t.
You wrote a check and you bought it back, which is a testament to your belief that there’s value in this. Because if you didn’t believe it, you wouldn’t have wrote a check to buy it all back. And in fact, you were shocked when you were given the opportunity to buy it back because you’re going, “This is worth way more than you guys understand. I will absolutely buy it back because you’re giving me a deal. You’re giving me a bargain here because this is really super valuable.”
And I think one of the things that really impressed me when first spent a day together and you were sharing this, that I was like, “You really believe in the value of this and you really experienced it.” Look, you experienced it from stepping into somewhere for operations, which suddenly took them from not making money to making money. To then starting from scratch your own HVAC company, growing it to a million dollars, to then creating systems and processes and brand to create this national thing that all of a sudden have a hundred plus franchisees, or sorry, doing $108 million, that then sold to a multi-billion dollar business that you then work at.
I mean, every step of the way you’ve touched this, and I don’t think there’s anyone around in the HVAC industry that has that depth of knowledge of experience running a franchise network, working with a multi-billion dollar company, doing a startup, being the outside person brought in as the employee. Doing sales, like those hard sales, right in day one. It’s really quite an incredible journey that you guys have gone on. How many members are there now today with CertainPath?
Rebecca Cassel:
We have almost 1,200, which is phenomenal for us. No, it’s been an area of focus, and it’s exciting to see the number of people. Steve, when people ask me all the time, “Why do you do this?” And the stories that come out from the results that people get after joining our organization, it’s almost like you can’t even believe that.
Stephen Semple:
Yes. Yeah.
Rebecca Cassel:
I get people come up and hug me at expos and say, “I got to put my kid through college because you guys helped me run my business better,” or “My wife and I got to take vacations we’ve never got to take.” Or “I finally help my employees who wanted to buy their first home.” I mean, just the trickle-down effects of the lives that we impact and the lives that we have transformed by just simply helping someone with their business is pretty amazing. It’s very infectious. It’s like, what other job can you do and feel this rewarded and this grateful and thankful to such a great group of people?
Stephen Semple:
So I have a confession to make, although I believe I’ve made this confession to you before. So when we first started working together, we spent a day together and then we spent another day together putting together a strategy and all those other things. And what really impressed me was, yes, this passion and this belief, and yes, it’s a business, but like you and Lon and your entire team, Abigail and everybody really and truly do get excited when they hear these success stories. And it is just great working with a business that has that leaf. But I want to talk about Expo for a second because you were like, “Oh, you should come to this. You should come to the X number of day Expo.” And I was like, “Oh, well, you are a customer and you are asking me, another conference. I’m going to go because I kind of have to.” And I’m going to be really frank. That’s how I approached it.
And the job you guys do at Expo, the quality of the presenters, the things that are done, look, everybody says, “Our members are enthusiastic.” Everyone says, “That the true enthusiasm and passion that your members have and the team have towards your members surprise the hell out of me.” I was like, “Wow, this is way better than I thought it was going to be.” It was a really super high quality event to the degree where the members on my team that I put together to help you with the account that were unable to make it to Expo last time are coming this time in the fall. Because I’ve said to them, “No, you really do need to see this and experience it, and it’s totally worth the time.”
But I think it’s also a testament to the quality and the care that you put into this. It’s not just the informational thing. It is something to celebrate the transformations that these businesses have gone through. And the stories that I heard over and over again were incredible, and I was hearing them when you weren’t around, right, so I know they were true.
Rebecca Cassel:
No, I got to tell you, my entire team, we pull those off by ourselves. We only hire security and audio visual people on those. That team has traveled with us for 17 years and-
Stephen Semple:
Incredible.
Rebecca Cassel:
All the content, and all the presentations, everything, it’s my team and they’re fantastic group of people who passionately care about our members having the most amazing experience at Expo. This business is hard, and we do it twice a year or get together twice a year because every six months you need a little pick me up to go, “I know what it’s like. This is hard. Be around a bunch of people who are doing a bunch of hard stuff all the time. Let’s all talk and network and share ideas and train and learn and grow together, and then get motivated to tap into another six months.”
Stephen Semple:
And I think this is what’s special about what you’ve built at CertainPath is the senior management team at CertainPath, when you say it’s hard, you’re not just saying it. You experienced it, you experienced the long days, you experienced the stress, you experienced the rejection, and you’ve experiences the challenges of every step.
It’s not that the challenges go away when all of a sudden you have a hundred franchisees, they just change into a different set of challenges. But you’re one of the few people in the industry that have experienced every step of the way of that, and most of your senior management team have had that as well. And I think that that brings a very, very different perspective when you’re helping these people with their transition because it’s not just theoretical what you’re saying. You did it, you’ve lived it, you truly have the empathy for it, and when they succeed, you truly have the excitement for them because you’ve been there and you’ve walked in those booty covered shoes.
So, Rebecca, this is fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to share the story. It is a remarkable and fantastic story. I’m really honored to be part of the next evolution in terms of making this really the thing it deserves to be, which is way better known in the industry than it is. But if somebody wants to reach out to you guys and find out more about CertainPath, what should they be doing?
Rebecca Cassel:
No, we would love to chat with them. They can go to our website at www.mycertainpath.com. There is a couple of different ways to engage with us, our phone number is there on our site. You can also do a starter session. You click on the button and say, “Hey, I’d like a starter session.” And this is just basically a 90-minute opportunity to understand what it is we do. You’ll get value from it. We’ll give you some things that you could immediately go back and implement into your business and see success with.
You can also just book an appointment if you don’t want to actually speak with somebody, you can just book with an appointment, an advisor. We also do events all throughout the country and in Canada at our Profit Day, and this is a full day workshop where we are sharing with you about the things that we have seen kill companies. And helping you understand what can you do to kind of fight these things off and then share with you a little bit more about what we do and how we could help. So any of those ways, we’d love to engage with you. Of course, if you’d love to just come see our office, we’re in Addison, Texas. We have a fantastic training room, and we would welcome you with open arms if you walk in and say, “I’d like to hear more about CertainPath. Where’s Rebecca Cassel?”
We’d love to share everything that we could. We’d love to help more contractors. That’s our mission, is to continue to help independent contractors grow their brand, be successful, achieve their dreams.
Stephen Semple:
If you’re a contractor, I’m going to really encourage for you to reach out to CertainPath because, look, there’s other training companies out there, and what I find a lot of it is it’s a business and it’s theoretical. You guys are the real deal. You’ve walked the walk, you’ve faced the challenges, and you really know what it takes to be successful. And your track record with helping folks is fantastic so I highly encourage people to do that.
And, Rebecca, thank you very much for taking the time out of your day. It’s an amazing story. You’ve really been on quite a journey, and it’s going to be fun to see what the next chapter unfolds.
Rebecca Cassel:
Stephen, I’ve really enjoyed it.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.
