S21 E379: Mike Greene - Air Controlled Products

Ian, welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. I am

your host. Ian Altman, our guest today is Mike Green of air

controlled products. That is the name, right? Mike, yep, that is

correct. Their control products. We've had the good pleasure of

working with Mike and his team for a number of years, and it's

always helpful for our listeners to hear about other people's

successes and what they're doing and kind of their story of

sameside selling in their business. So Mike, welcome to

the podcast. Thanks. Ian, thanks for having me. So can you tell

people, give people a little bit of background on air control

products, or, as I often have in my system, is ACP. But you know,

because everyone needs a good abbreviation, but tell me the

background of the company and the markets you serve and what

you guys do.

So my father started air control products

architectural arm. So we have architectural, movable walls and

other specialized equipment. We're in Ohio. We cover three

quarters of Ohio. So my dad used to work for a wholesaler, and he

developed a business just like this for that wholesaler, and

decided to go out on his own. So starting air control products in

1975 from scratch, there was nothing there. He built the

company up to about $12 million during his tenure. I took the

company over about 15 years ago with that 12 million in sales,

and today we branched it up to nearly 100 so a lot of stuff has

happened in between there. I'm your typical second generation

that wanted to blow it up. My dad wanted to keep it somewhat

small. And I was Dad. There's more here. I can see it, I can

feel it. Let's go. And he didn't have the appetite for that. So

once I took over, I started making a few changes. Started

doing some things. I joined Vistage, which is how I met Ian,

and they started giving me the tools that I needed to make it

go. We were blessed to be in the HVAC industry, which, since

COVID has just exploded, everybody realizes now how

important fresh air is for a building, and we are in the

commercial side of things. We're not on residential so that

that's a little bit different place,

if you will. And your customers who are as much

partners as they are customers, who are you typically selling

to, or working with, or partnering with on your

projects? We're working with sheet

metal mechanical contractors. Is who buys the

material. We also work with mechanical engineers and

architects. Those are the guys who design the buildings. They

hopefully use our equipment as their basis to design when the

job goes out for bid,

got it and so when we started working together,

what size was the business? Then we were about 42 million. Okay,

so 42 million, and that was how long ago? Two years ago, yeah,

two, so, two, you know, and so, and now, now you're about 100

million. And so, what was the driving force behind changing

the sales approach or giving people different tools? I mean,

you got an amazing team of people. Your reps are fantastic.

I just find they're always highly engaged, like when I when

I see them on our Same Side Selling Academy, it's like they

always have great questions and great insight. And even there's

times where someone else will ask a question, I'll give an

answer, we'll roleplay it, and I'll say, Who else has an idea?

And like Kyle and your team will jump in and go, Well, here's

another way to approach it. So what was the driving force

behind introducing these concepts? Well,

the sales team here, the culture here, is

always trying to learn more. We have a young team, I'd say, when

they're young, they're in their 30s, and they're always looking

to be the best they can be. And we were coming up with a lot of

different theories, and we needed someone to validate what

we were going through. And I was fortunate enough to meet you at

a Vistage meeting maybe four years ago, and you kind of

brought all these theories to light. And when my guys were

coming in here saying, Mike, help me understand this better,

your name popped into my head. It's like, I think Ian can help

us connect the dots. And that's what we were doing. We had a lot

of theories. We really work on relationships. We really want

our customers to feel like part of our family. That is key, but

trying to make sure that they understood we were on the same

side with them. This is what we can do to help you. A lot of

guys can see that. They only see the upfront costs. They can't

see what they actually cost them at the end of the job, and

that's what we do, really, really well,

yeah. And so in your industry, I imagine, I don't

even imagine, because I know, because we work with other

people in your industry, one of the challenges can be the

customer slash partner you're working with doesn't understand

the difference between what you do and what other people do. So

if someone else. Gives them a low ball bid that has no margin

in it for that manufacturer's rep, they think, Oh, this a

great deal, not knowing that those people now don't have the

resources to properly support them. So how big of an issue is

that? How do you guys overcome it?

That's a huge issue. There's so many problems

that happen in the field if things don't go right, think

about a construction crew. You got 30 guys show up on a job

site, and your material doesn't show up on time. Now you have to

dispatch 30 people to different jobs, put them all over the

place. It just takes a ton of time and effort. So we work

really hard here in project management, making sure we have

the number one manufacturers that can ship your materials on

time correctly, with no damages, that is huge. So there's about

10 things that we do, maybe 20 that we can show the customer

how they're actually saving money by spending a little more

upfront to buy our services. But we work extremely hard to make

sure we take it from cradle to grave without any problems.

Sure, because let's face it, if the material doesn't

show up, you're paying for that labor is sitting around looking

at each other, or if all of a sudden there's a problem in the

field, if you're dealing with someone who's kind of your your

bottom feeder in the industry, and they got a problem, that

person's like, well, I don't know. I just sell the product. I

have no idea. One of the things that impressed me is when I came

out to to your facility was the extent to which you guys have

product warehoused ready. So if all of a sudden someone says,

oh, we need 20 VAVS for this install. And it turns out they

need 26 in most cases, you have product in inventory, and you're

like, yeah, we can get someone out there in the next hour to

bring this to you. And instead of that, instead of that

contractor burning labor that's doing nothing, they don't miss a

trick, and all of a sudden they're getting the job done

faster. They're avoiding delays, and it probably helps them win

the next job.

Absolutely, keeping a customer happy is number one.

But yeah, our manufacturers and us work really hard on making

sure we have quick ships. So just the other day, one of our

fans showed up and it had a damaged piece. The box looked

fine. It was damaged. You know, one of those mystery things that

happens. We called our manufacturer, we had one next

day, aired that day, so they could have it put in the

following day. A lot of our competition can't even do that,

right? But we can make those kinds of things

happen. And also part of that has to do with your

guys philosophy and how you're always partnering with your

customers. But it also has something to do with because the

volume you're doing when you call up the manufacturer and

say, Hey, I need this shipped. It's got to be here overnight.

They don't say who they're like, Oh, we got to get this

overnight, because the guys that air control products, they're in

a pinch, and we got to make sure we're taking care of them, which

in turn takes care of your partner, slash customer, as

well.

That's a great point. We've elevated ourselves

through the additional sales to become a very, very shiny object

for our manufacturers. I've got really good relationships with

the ownership of all of our manufacturers, and they do go

out of their way to make sure they help us. And that's that

the relationship we have with our customers is just as

important as is our manufacturers, right? So we try

to be the easiest company to do business with, not only from the

manufacturing side, but the customer side as well, and the

employee side, right? We want to be easy to do business with

everybody we work with, and that's so key. And we preach

that constantly.

Yeah, that element of reducing the friction in the

process is something that I think nowadays, too many

companies overlook that. And you think about it, it's like if I

order an Uber to go someplace, I know exactly where that vehicle

is, what the person's rating is, history is, etc. If I order

something on Amazon, I know exactly where that is any point

in time. And then there's companies that are like, Oh,

well, this didn't happen, and we're not going to communicate

to the customer. You're like, no, no, you can't do that

because they've got staff out on this project. I know that when

we were working with your team, a lot of it came down to, I

mean, it's cliche, but how do we end up on the same side with our

customers? Because you guys are trying to solve the same puzzle

together, and I think that that's just it's a cultural fit

for your team, because everybody has that same mindset. So what

is it that you look for when you're hiring when you're

recruiting people in sales, when you're recruiting people for

your team, what skills do you look for that other people can

learn from? Because you got just great people.

We've done a phenomenal job recruiting a big

heart drive friendly relationship based typically,

our sales guys have a lot of friends. You know, they have a

lot of things going on. They relate to people. Well, I think

that's about 90% of it. They're all smart kids. They can learn a

lot of stuff. And we're good at teaching our wares. We can teach

you CFM, static pressures, fans, air distribution louvers, air

handling units. We can do all of that. The piece that we can't

teach is that. Normal human being piece, and we've done a

really nice job of attracting that crowd. We have a lot of

friends out there looking for people for us. Our banker sent

us His Son. We recruit. He's going to the college we recruit

from University of Akron, and he went over there during a an

engagement, and he's here as a co op on a sales bench program.

If you want to get top results for your team, take

a look at the sameside selling Academy. Just visit

samesideselling.com to learn more. So

we have a lot of friends looking out for us.

We've made it a desirable workplace. We try to have a lot

of fun. And that's a whole other topic. Ian about having fun at

work. It's not like we do a lot of extracurricular things. We

just generally have a culture of having fun that's everyday,

laughing, working together again, liking each other. It's

been an awesome culture,

yeah, and I think it's something that a lot of

businesses overlook because they get so focused on well, people

have to do this, they have to do that, that they forget that.

Look, people do well, when they're enjoying what they're

doing and your team, they always have that curiosity. Also, like,

hey, what's the client really trying to solve? Here you were

telling me a story about a scenario with a client where

it's like, look, the key to the conversation was, how do we

figure out what the client's actually trying to solve? Like,

instead of the client's upset about something, but what are

they actually trying to solve? How do we get to that? I don't

know if you can share that story or a piece of it. I'll leave it

to you as to how much of that you can share.

Well, we had a problem out in the field, and

the architect was upset, and he called a meeting together to

find out what the issue was, and we all kind of knew what it was.

It wasn't a product issue. It was a timing issue. So it turns

out that his customer was upset with he went to six meetings in

a row for six weeks. Everybody showed up in the meeting and

didn't have answers. Right? That was we all thought other things

were wrong, but we just asked him, politely and kindly from

curiosity, what do we need to do here again? We all had an idea

of what we thought it was, but it wasn't as easy as when he

spit it out. He just said, Hey, I got an upset client. I got to

figure out how to solve this. Well, it turns out one of the

guys in the meeting knows him personally. Nobody knew that,

right? And the other issue was pretty simple, but we all

thought it was a bigger problem than it was. I think when we all

go to meetings, we we don't really understand the landscape

that's around us. We all just assume that George is just going

to be a hard ass in the meeting and make demands. Well, rarely,

when you put 10 people in a room and we're all looking at each

other, rarely does that ever happen.

Yeah, yeah. And I think solve the issue, yeah. I

mean, when you and I talked about it was all about, hey,

look, we just want to show them that we're being reasonable, and

then ask them, hey, you know, here's the way we're approaching

it. Here's our perspective on it. Help us understand how

that's different from your perspective. And it sounded like

you had everyone on the same side, and it was like, Oh, well,

now all of a sudden, what the resolution they came to was just

a reasonable resolution. It wasn't like you were trying to

get something more out of them, or they were trying to get

something more out of you. You were just trying to find a good

outcome for everybody.

Yep, absolutely. And that's what came out. And

they couldn't argue with that. When we set our case, we pleaded

it out there. They were like, yeah, yeah, we agree with you.

Okay, if you agree with me, and we're on the same on this, we're

on the same side of this, then how do we solve it?

Go ahead. My favorite part about the story,

though, was how you were facing this in advance of the meeting,

and then what led you to reach out to me so tell us about that

was great.

The one thing that I truly learned from Ian was the

role playing. I think that's so important. I do that with every

big decision coming up, or every meeting that has some meat to it

that I don't think that, or I think I can use a little bit of

help. So I called my lead sales guy, Kyle, and I said, Kyle, I

need some help role playing today. We're yet, and he was at

a golf outing. He's like, dude, I'm out of pocket all day long.

Sorry. He's like, just call Ian. I'm like, Oh, I don't know why.

I didn't think of that. So yeah, I called Ian. We went through it

right before the meeting. I was fresh in my mind. I sat down, I

laid it out, and the guys looked at me like, yeah, yeah, we agree

with you. Mike, okay, then how do we solve the problem? Let's

go from there so we hit kind of a level ground with each other,

sure, and we were all on the same page,

yep. And solved it. So you're but your meeting went

well. The other day,

the meeting went, great, yeah, I took your advice

and I gave them the different scenarios and put it on a menu

and put it in front of them, and it totally disarmed them to what

they were going to argue. I think they had. An agenda may be

in their mind, but when I put that in front of them, they

looked a little pondered, and it took him a minute, yeah. And so

he kind of went back to, well, we still have a problem, and

this is my problem. So we flushed the problem out that he

had early in the meeting, yeah, so I wasn't trying to struggle

to figure out what the real issue was. What was the real

issue? The issue was the owner was upset with him, and he was

upset with some other things that we really weren't part of,

and that was his problem, and his problem turned into our

problem inadvertently, and that's why we were in that

meeting. Yeah, so we helped him dissolve that with his partner,

which is kind of what we suspected anyhow, which

is the owners pissed off because the architect and designer

didn't catch stuff, or that the the other contractor didn't

catch stuff. And it's like, you know, basically someone was

like, Well, I'm in trouble. Let me see if I can extract

something out of Mike,

yeah. So, you know, and we try to be good partners

in this community that we live in, and try to help everybody,

right? So we're all there to help solve the solution, yeah,

one of the partners felt that if we offered to help, it would be

an admission of guilt, which is always an issue, but I think you

have to position yourself clearly on that front as well.

Like, hey, of course, we don't really know exactly what

happened, but however, we're here to help. So what does that

look like? So the next job comes along, and everybody helps

everybody again on the next project, but you form

relationships that help you get the next thing done quicker,

sure, sure. And hopefully, before it gets to a problem like

that, we can get to the fire quicker, if you will. Yeah, and

it was forming better relationships too, Ian and

making sure they know they can talk to us,

sure. Yeah. And I think by sharing it the way you

did, it gets puts them in a position where they're like,

well, Mike's being totally reasonable. Yes, makes perfect

sense. Like, it's tough for someone to go, well, you're

being totally reasonable, but I still don't like it, like, it's

like, okay, you're being totally reasonable. Maybe we need to own

some of this too. Okay, cool. Like, that's, that's fine. Like,

I'm not looking for you to do this alone, guys. I just want to

make sure we're being fair.

Yep, that's exactly right. And we role played that

quite a bit going in as well to make sure that it sounded fluid.

We knew what we were talking about. We had the passion in our

voices, yeah, so we had the right tone, you know, like, Hey,

this is how it looks to us. How does it look to you guys?

Yeah, but it's like curiosity. It's right, exactly.

It's the curiosity, and it's not the self righteous and

indignation of like, we're right, you're wrong. It's like,

Hey, here's the way we're seeing it. But maybe that's maybe we're

wrong in this and, like, no, it's probably right. Okay, well,

now that we know that's right, what do we do to solve it? Okay?

And it's like, just makes life a little bit easier that way. So,

and I feel if you

come with positive intent and common sense a lot of

times and you're right, self righteousness is out the window.

It's like, hey, just help us understand what we got to deal

with here. Because I think there's so many meetings, people

ping pong and everybody. It takes people a half hour to try

to figure out what the real problem is. But if you could

just get them to tell you, yeah, it's so much easier, right?

Because you can assume

Yeah, and that's you got it. Man, that's that's the

lion's share of it. It's just fascinating. How many people

overlook that kind of stuff. And you're like, look, this is

pretty straightforward, guys. It's just like, you know, and

and usually people are afraid to hear the truth. And you're like,

look, you know, getting the truth is a really good thing.

It's just like, it's not a bad thing. Like, if someone's pissed

off about something, that's fine. And Mike, I know that you

talked about how your dad started this business, and you

know, when you took it over, was about 15 million, and now you're

up to about 100 million. I know you've got your son in the

business also. So what's that like? That's

been an awesome experience for me. My son went

to the University of Cincinnati. He took business and he worked

down there for about five years before he came to work for me.

And you know, during that time, I'm in my upper 50s, so I'm

looking at what I'm going to do. And in our industry, there's

been a lot of consolidation going on right now, so a lot of

big multiples, a lot of money flowing around out there. So a

lot of my buddies are selling out. Yeah, well, when you have a

son in the business, or a family member in the business, it re

energizes you. I've now have the rejuvenation of building this

with him, and he's a pretty smart kid, which really helped.

He's smarter than me, so I've got the wisdom and experience,

and he has the brains for business. So the two of us make

a power couple right now, which has really been awesome.

Because, you know, when I've been doing this my whole life, I

started out with sales with my dad when I was in my early 20s,

you know, got into management and then took over the company,

so I probably don't have the energy that I did. So helping

Michael grow the company now has been a. Phenomenal experience.

For me. Our vendors love it because they don't really want a

lot of big conglomerates owning up the industry. They like the

mom and pop sure, because we're on the road every day, we're

hugging customers. We're friends with our customers, and that's a

lot more appealing. But yeah, it's been a phenomenal

experience. Thanks for asking. He started buying the company

for me in January of this year. That's great. We're looking

forward to that transition. That's a tough negotiation. It's

going to be a long 10 year adventure. So,

but, you know, that's awesome. So what's next

for air control products? What are the things that one of the

things that you notice you were also sharing how you've

incorporated some of the Same Side Selling principles into the

materials that you share with your partners and customers.

Yes, so I created a in a engagement strategy manual,

you know, kind of copied a little bit of what you've been

doing. Ian, and in here, it's all the different things that we

can do differently than our competitors that a lot of people

don't realize. You know that project management piece dealing

with the number one manufacturers in understanding

where our clients are in the client vision pyramid. So in it,

it's got a little bit of of that, but it's based a lot

around what you preach Ian or teach, I should say, but it's a

lot of common sense too. It just takes what you do and understand

it better and relay that to your customers. Your customers don't

know all the things you do. You have to tell them. We assume

they know how great we are. Hey, we're awesome. We're air control

products. No, they don't care. They don't know, but they need

to understand, and we have to prove it to them, so we can keep

them all day long, but if we don't prove it to them, doesn't

mean anything.

Yeah, and that notion of them understanding

that, oh, here's what we do to make sure that your employees

aren't sitting idle on a job site waiting for stuff. Here's

what we do. Like you mentioned a couple times that, well, we

found this thing, and it was defective. It was faulty. Guess

what? There's a lot of people in your industry or just drop

shipping, they're not inspecting stuff when it comes in, so

you're catching stuff two or three steps before it would ever

become a problem. And that's something that, if we don't tell

them, the HVAC contractor has no idea that that's a real risk,

until they work with someone like that and they go, What do

you mean? It showed up defective, and you didn't know.

You guys have a whole process of how you receive stuff, how you

inspect it before it goes out. Other people are just like, oh

yeah, just, you know, slap it, you know, throw it into a truck

and drop it off. Oh, it's defective. Okay, now we'll deal

with it like it's too late at that point,

right, right? We opened up a Service Division

about two years ago, and we head out to the job site and do the

startup on the materials. We know our equipment. They're

factory authorized, so these guys can get it fixed before

they actually have to use it. Hopefully we're a few months

ahead of time so we can work on those problems. A lot of

problems that happen in the field aren't ours either, but we

can identify them. There's a lot of control issues. They got to

tell the unit to start, and they just don't have things hooked up

correctly, yeah, a lot of pieces, and we have to work

together as a team to get it all working. Everybody's got to be

there,

sure. So Mike, for people who are looking they go,

Wow. So Mike took this thing over at like, 12 to 15 million,

grew it to 40 now, grew it to 100 million. What are some of

the key lessons that you would share with them that says, hey,

you know, if you're looking to grow at this type of pace, here

are some of the key steps. Here are two or three things you

really got to focus on to achieve that level of

success. So one of my mentors told me, always work

on your foundation. So whatever that looks like for your

company, always build and continue building the foundation

of what you're doing, also working with great people,

hiring good people, and making sure that everybody in your

company is working in the same direction, keeping open

communications, making it a desirable workplace if nobody

wants to come work for you, that's bad, right? People have

got to want to come to work for you. And this is something I

learned 15 years ago, because air control products hasn't been

the ideal place to work for its entire 50 years of existence.

There was a time there where it wasn't very bright so and that I

grew up here during that time frame, so understanding that I

wanted to make it a desirable workplace, and working on your

reputation, taking care of your people, always doing the right

thing, building trust. I know a lot of these things are cliche,

but they are so true. Hard work and dedication to your people,

your employees, and building that foundation is probably our

biggest reason for success.

Yeah, and you guys live it. So I think the

challenge is that other people talk about, well, we want to

look out for our employees and our customers, but for them, it

is a cliche. For you guys, it's part of your culture. So part of

your DNA is, are we taking care of people? I remember you

mentioned Kyle when. And Kyle's wife gave birth. It wasn't like,

oh, when are you coming into work? It was like, Hey, Kyle,

what are you doing to make sure you're there for your family and

this and that that's more important than anything going on

at work? It wasn't like, you know, there's a lot of companies

were like, Oh, you had a baby. That's great. You're gonna be in

tomorrow. Like, it's at that point. It's like, we care about

our employees, but only extent that you're going to be here

tomorrow.

Right now, we work really hard on making sure that

when people take vacations or maternity leave, whatever, we

have their back covered. That's why we so many things here.

We're talking right now about vacation season coming. So part

of my soapbox speech for our Tuesday morning meetings is make

sure you guys have all your ducks in a row. We know when

you're leaving. You know who your backup is, so we don't have

to call you. We do not want to call you on vacation. We want

you to go and get re energized and come back and feel better

than

ever. That's great. So what's next as we wrap this

up, or any final words that you want to share with people,

continuing

to build a great company you know that can

forever last, making sure that we put my son in a position for

success, surrounding him with the right people. It's about

building that foundation. I don't care how big you get, you

always need to work on your foundation. So that's next. We

have a lot of opportunities coming our way as we continue to

grow. So I don't know exactly where we're going. I'm the

visionary. So that's probably not a good statement, but I know

about how we're going to get there. We have a lot of great

people, and for the first time in my career, I feel that we

have enough people on the bench to do whatever we whatever comes

our way, and we're getting pretty good at it. But again, it

comes down to the people, and having them happy and giving

them the right tools to be successful, you have to pour

into them and they will give it right back to you. Absolutely,

that's awesome. Well, Mike, congratulations.

Amazing success. It's always fun to see, because I can share

these concepts with anybody. It's the companies that actually

internalize it, implement it. Seeing you have the client

vision pyramid in the document you're sharing with your

partners and customers is kind of the epitome of that, that

you're you're not just, you know, giving it lip service, you

guys are actually living it, which I think has a lot to do

with the success you guys have had, and just that culture of

caring for your customers, your employees. You can't fake that

stuff, and the authenticity you guys have is really inspiring.

And I'm sure it's given a lot of other people ideas too. So

thanks for taking the time to share your story.

It has absolutely when we can help our customers

grow their business through our theories. It actually works, so

we're helping them become better business people as well. So it's

significant. Keeps on giving.

Yeah, gotta love it. All right. Thanks again, Mike,

all right. Ian, take care. You.