Her team named her Bosslady. She just kept it. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Katie Smith, co-founder of All Pro Heating, Air & Plumbing, the Indianapolis HVAC and plumbing company she and her husband started at their kitchen table in 2012. It wasn’t the first one. Before this there was direct sales, selling legal services, and then a general contracting outfit they closed on their attorney’s advice. All Pro is the version that stuck. They ran punches, HVAC, and plumbing at the same time long enough to learn those are three separate businesses staffed by three different kinds of people, so they picked HVAC and stayed there for more than a decade before adding plumbing back in the last two years. Nobody has a passion for crawl spaces in July. What they had was a lack of opportunity where they were working, and a decision on a sofa that Katie can still picture.
Matt asks every guest the same three questions. Six months of savings, a detailed strategic plan, a clear read on what customers would pay. Katie had a rough plan and the knowledge that the work made money, and that was the whole of it, which puts her in company with nearly every founder who’s sat in that chair. What she has now is a system, and getting to it took a convention in Miami two years ago where the real question was scale it or get out. She thought a service call had 13 steps. She mapped it. It has 76. Her leadership team guessed five. Along the way she fired her first employee after two weeks, learned that growing and scaling are different problems, and found out that the system that gets you here is never the one that takes you to the next level. Ask what she’d tell herself the night before going full time and there’s no pause: document your processes. Then go do the market research she skipped.
Learn more about Katie Smith and All Pro Heating, Air & Plumbing at https://callallproindy.com/.
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