Elevating Work Ethic: Corey Berrier on Integrity, Excellence, and the Moral Compass in Trades

When the clock strikes the hour and not a second later, you know you've met someone who values punctuality as deeply as I do. This episode isn't just about sticking to a timetable; it's an impassioned exploration of ethics in the trades, where core values like thoroughness and a relentless drive to exceed expectations hold the key to excellence.  I'm not just discussing HVAC systems or the intricacies of plumbing—I'm seizing the call to elevate our work ethic to illuminate the path that leads us to outshine the rest in service and value. We navigate the treacherous waters of mediocrity and finger-pointing, steering clear by nurturing an unwavering commitment to integrity across every job.

But it's when we touch on the moral fabric of honest selling that this conversation truly resonates. Imagine ensuring that the very air your customers breathe in their homes is clean and safe—this is the reality we confront with unwavering resolve. Sharing my own battles with substance recovery, I invite you to reflect on the weighty choices that shape our health and the health of those we serve. It's more than a trade; it's a testament to the virtue of doing what's right for fulfillment that transcends transactions and crafts, not just a livelihood but a life rich with satisfaction and prosperity. Join me in a heartfelt call to action that aspires to instill genuine value and integrity at the heart of our business practices.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:58

Welcome to the successful live podcast. I'm your host, corey Berry, and today, folks, I'm solo and we're going to talk about something that is and look if it sounds like I'm yelling it's just passion. That's all it is, it's just passion. If you work for an HVAC company, if you work for a plumbing company or electrical company, then you're probably listening to this show, and so and, by the way, I appreciate you listening to this show but we're going to dive into something that I think is vitally important to both you as a man or woman, and you as an employee, or you as an owner. Feel in the blank, everybody in the trades falls into this category, which is ethics, and my question to you, before we go any further, is do you think you're an ethical individual? Do you feel like your core values, what you stand for? Do you live by those? Do you live by your core values? Now, what are core values? You might be asking. Core values are I'm going to do the best job that I possibly can. I'm going to show up on time to every single appointment. I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do. Those are just three general core values that most people should have, but I would argue that most people don't possess.

Speaker 1: 2:21

And look, if you're an employee for a company, you signed up for a particular pay, right, they said. The company says I'm going to pay you X number of dollars to come here and provide products or services and services for that matter to our customers. In exchange for that pay, or in exchange for the products and services you're going to offer, you get paid X number of dollars. Now it is unethical for and I'm going to speak to comfort advisors, salespeople. It's unethical for you not to show up on time. It's unethical for you to not provide an estimate for all of your customers. It is unethical not to ask a million questions to find out exactly what it is they need or what they want. It's unethical for you to come to someone's house and not do a full inspection on their plumbing or their HVAC or their electrical so you can provide them with the proper solutions. It is unethical for you to walk out of that house and give someone a price and not check their ductwork. It's unethical for you not to test all the things that you need to test to make sure everything is working my God, at least up to code. And up to code is bare minimum. That's what the state requires, not going above and beyond, which is one of my core values.

Speaker 1: 4:00

I go above and beyond what I'm asked to do, and I don't know about you. Maybe that doesn't make sense. Maybe you do the bare minimum and guess what? You're always going to get the bare minimum. You're never going to be able to be a successful. You have a successful life if you do the bare minimum.

Speaker 1: 4:24

Look, people that are successful do things that other people are not willing to do. People that are successful go through things that you'll never even hear about. People that are successful grind their face off in order to be successful. And maybe that's not you. Maybe you're a business owner that sits on Facebook all day and screws around and looks what everybody else is doing and compares yourself and blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah, blah. That is not running a business. So I know I went off with a slight tangent there. But look, if you're a salesperson and you come to your customer's house and you ask them for 15, 20, $30,000 to replace their system, you best give them enough value to ask for that price, because I can tell you right now if you don't, you're going to lose every single time, if you show up late, if you don't put your shoe covers on, if you don't make good conversation with that customer, ask them questions, that will better. That will better give you a framework of what it is you need to provide them as a product or service.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Now it may sound like I'm screaming at you and I get pretty passionate about this, because I see people in this industry half-ass their jobs. I see people in this industry do the bare minimum and then they complain about why they're not successful. Look, this is not rocket science. You, whatever you put into this, you're gonna get out of it. And if you're not getting what you want out of this, out of your job, if you're not getting, you're not making the money you wanna make.

Speaker 1: 6:13

I would tell you to look in the mirror. I would tell you to look in the mirror and ask yourself what can I do different? Because if you do the same thing every single day, you're gonna get the same result. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. How ridiculous is that? It's totally ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. So if you're wondering why you've had a slow month, maybe you're not marketing, maybe you're not providing training for your employees. Look, training is not coming in and barking at your employees to get them to act right. It's not coming in and telling them everything they're doing wrong. In fact, that's the opposite way to have great employees.

Speaker 1: 7:15

Nobody wants to work for someone that's a dick. Nobody wants to work for someone who never tells them they did a good job. No one wants to work for someone who's always negative. Nobody wants to work for somebody who always has a negative outlook on life, a negative outlook on the business, a negative outlook on their performance. Now, if you're not performing and you're constantly getting yelled at, well, that falls on you. That doesn't fall on the owner. It doesn't fall on your boss. It's not your boss's fault that you're unsuccessful. Your boss built the business. He provided a place for you to come every single day of the week to make money. And, guys, that's a lot harder than you can ever, ever freaking imagine it is. It takes grit, it takes fortitude, it takes perseverance. It takes long ass, days and nights to build a business. That's why a lot of people don't build a business. That's why a lot of people fail in business, because it's just not worth it and for a lot of folks it's not worth it. For a lot of folks it's just better to be a really great employee and pull down three, four $500,000 a year.

Speaker 1: 8:40

I'll be honest with you Sometimes, look, I've run my own businesses. I have failed miserably at business, but I learned from those mistakes. I learned that if you take your eye off the ball, you're gonna make mistakes. I've learned that if you don't treat your employees well, they're not gonna be your employees anymore. They're gonna go work for the competition for a dollar more, $2 more, and so what you're doing is failing yourself when you don't pour into your employees, when you don't treat your employees like they're human beings, and so that shows up at the customer's house. You know, I have been around a lot of companies over the last five years and I've seen a lot of people do this right. I've seen a lot of people do this wrong, and the proof is in. Look at your bank account. If you're struggling right now in your bank account, that's because you're doing things the wrong way or you're making mistakes. Now I'm not saying people shouldn't make mistakes. Like I said before, I have made plenty of mistakes in business. I've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because I didn't pay attention to certain things. I have spun my wheels.

Speaker 1: 10:14

I know exactly how you feel if you think to yourself, I can't do anything right, but I'll also tell you. If you're thinking you can't do anything right, you're probably right. If you think that this is just a period of time where I'm learning how to be a better business owner, you're right. If you think you suck, you're right. If you think that you're gonna win every single day, no matter what, you're right At the end of the day. If you believe that you're gonna be successful or that you're gonna fail, you're 100% right.

Speaker 1: 10:58

Your mind needs to stay in a positive mindset. If you're not in a positive mindset, you gotta take a look in the mirror and figure out why. If you're pissed off every single day and you're upset, you need to take a look in the mirror and say why is that? What am I doing that I could do differently? And at the end of the day, nobody can answer that but you. Nobody is going to make these changes for you. So if you think that's going to happen, if you think a magic fairy is going to come down and just change everything for you, you're dead ass wrong. You're wrong I mean, you've got rose-colored glasses on If you think that your employees are going to go out and crush it every single day for you without having some positive reinforcement. You're wrong If you think that your employees are going to have your company's best interest at heart. But you're a dick. You're wrong.

Speaker 1: 12:15

Now, I'm not saying that you can't be hard on your employees. There is a time and a place for that. But there's also a time and a place to empathetically identify with what they're going through. Look, we all know this. We are coming out of shoulder season, one of the slowest times of the year. People's mindset is lower than it normally is.

Speaker 1: 12:38

People get down and you've got to recognize that as a leader in your company, whether you're the sales manager, like I am, whether you're the owner, whether you're the technician manager, whether you're the service manager, whether you're if you're in a leadership position, it's your job to make sure the health of your employees is optimal. Your customers are your customers, but your employees are your first customers. If you don't serve those employees, guess what? They are not going to serve your customers. They are not going to go to bat for you when it's hard. They're going to say, well, he just doesn't give a shit. Well, you know, if my boss treats me this way, then it must be okay, it must be the way things are done, right. So you can look at how your employees treat your customers and you can ask yourself do I treat my employees that way? And the answer is likely yes, likely.

Speaker 1: 13:51

If your technicians or your comfort advisors are going out and they're not closing deals and they're losing, what are you doing wrong? Do you have systems and processes in place that will effectively train your employees to be better employees, to sell better, to serve better, to make sure that when they go to a house, they don't leave anything on the table? Because I'll tell you, it's not the industry standard, not the industry standard to go out and try to win every single day. In fact, it's the industry standard to half acid. Are you the industry standard or are you above the cut? Are you above everybody else? Are you going to win today? Because I can tell you right now I'm going to win today. I'm going to win every single effing day, every single day. I'm going to win, because that's where I've trained my mind to believe.

Speaker 1: 14:52

Now, does that mean I'm not going to have a bad day? No, of course I'm going to have a bad day or a bad hour or a bad minute, but I'm not actually. I don't have bad days. I may have a bad few minutes, I may have a dip in my day, but guess what? I'm not going to stay there Because I'm going to recognize it for what it is.

Speaker 1: 15:14

And look, the only thing if you don't learn from having these bad days, or when you lose a sale, well, you didn't lose it because you never had it. So I hate when people say, oh, I lost that one, no, you didn't lose it, you never had it In your mind, you had it. And that's probably the problem. And so, look, when you go to a house and you're talking to a customer and you're trying to sell them, whatever, you're trying to sell them, stop doing that shit. Stop it. Stop trying to sell your product or service, because people don't want to be sold to. People want to feel like you have their best interest at heart. Take yourself out of the situation. Take yourself out of the sales role. You don't need to sell anything, but what you do need to do is ask, or what you want to do is ask good questions.

Speaker 1: 16:14

Let me ask you something, mr Customer, I know you said that your wife needs to think this over, but let me ask you a question. If you called your wife and you said honey, we are kids, are kids whichever. They're breathing unhealthy air. The air in our house is unhealthy and I'm not sure if you were aware of that, but do you want our children to breathe unhealthy air? Do you want our home to be an environment that produces unhealthy air? And the answer to that if you care about your kids and you should, if you brought them into this world, you should care about them. Now. Look, I know that sometimes it's easy to want to smack their bottom, but at the end of the day, you want what's best for them.

Speaker 1: 17:12

Let me ask you if you found out two years from now, mr Custer, let me ask you something If you found out two years from now that $175 a month could prevent it, little Johnny, from getting this lung disease, this lung deficiency, because of the air you were breathing, would you make the decision two years ago to not change out the air if you knew it was unhealthy? The answer to that is absolutely not. You would not choose to save $175 a month, $275 a month, $375 a month pick the number. For your child to suffer the rest of their life with some disease or some lung asthma, name it. Nobody wants their child to live uncomfortably and you shouldn't want your wife to live uncomfortably.

Speaker 1: 18:41

I'm sure there's some people thinking well, that might be nice, but you're probably just going through something. So if I told you, mr Custer, let's just pretend again. Two years from now, the doctor said you could have changed this diagnosis if you would have switched out, if you would have gotten that growth out of your HVAC system Two years ago, you could have changed this. But you decided to cheap out. Now I don't know about cheap, but I don't like cheap. Do you like cheap? Nobody likes cheap. So let's not talk about cheap, right?

Speaker 1: 19:24

When you're thinking about price objections, what is the value of your child's life, the health of your family? Take you out of the picture you got to look at or you don't have to, but you should look at how am I going to protect my family? And is there any amount of money that? Is there any amount of money that you wouldn't pay right now to protect your family? The answer to that is no. So when you feel like you're adding pressure to the customer to make the right decision, then you probably are, because you know in your heart that's the right thing to do. And look, I don't know about you, but I like doing the right thing. I like being able to sleep at night. And by coming in and offering a subpar service or subpar product, you're not doing the right thing. You're just trying to get a sale. And guess what, bro? We can all hear, we can see that, we can smell it a mile away. So start selling with your heart, not your mouth. Stop thinking about yourself.

Speaker 1: 20:52

When you're in someone's home, you're in the biggest investment that they've ever spent money on. My house is my biggest investment, for sure, and I want to protect it and I want to protect the people in it. And the only way that I can do that is doing the right thing. You know you wouldn't feed your child gobs of sugar every day if they had diabetes, right? Many of you know that I'm a recovering alcoholic. I don't think anybody listening to this show would try to force me to drink. I don't even think anybody listening to this show would want me to drink, and if you've met me before I stopped drinking, you certainly wouldn't want that for sure, because I would say that, ultimately, at the end of the day, you care about other people, but sometimes we get caught up in ourself, we get caught up in what we want, we get caught up in what is going to make our bank account fatter. And I'll just be honest with you, if that's how you're looking at things, it's just not going to work out for you.

Speaker 1: 22:00

Dude, I've tried it. I've tried to, you know, sell. I've tried to sell, sell, sell, sell and not care about the customer. And what do you think happened? I didn't. I wasn't winning, and so I can speak from experience here.

Speaker 1: 22:18

If you try, if you're trying to sell your product or service, you're going to fail Because it shouldn't have to be sold. You shouldn't have to go in and close every deal. The deal should close itself because the customer realizes that you care enough about him or her to tell them the truth. And the truth is, mr Customer, the air is unhealthy here. The truth is that your family is breathing unhealthy air right now and you can do something about it. And if you choose to cheap out and go somewhere else to save, you know, 40 or 50 bucks a month, that's your choice and you could do that. And you know what, mr Customer, I didn't really even have to tell you all this stuff, but it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to tell you how you can prevent your family from going through something in the future, and that's a different kind of mindset. That's a different kind of conversation than I just want to sell you my stuff.

Speaker 1: 23:23

No, look, I know that it probably feels like I beat you to death today, and I hope this is open your eyes to what's possible. I hope this is open your eyes to being a better person. You know you want to do things the right way, because that's the person that usually wins. There are turds out there that win anyway, and they're not good people yet. But do you really want to live like that? I don't think you do.

Speaker 1: 23:59

I know that I would rather sleep well at night knowing that I did the right thing by my customer. I want to sleep at night knowing that I gave everything to the employees that I could give. I want to make sure that I've given them all the tools in their toolbox to be successful, because if I don't, it's on me, and I don't want that. I don't want that responsibility. I just don't, and neither do you. You don't want to go to bed at night feeling like you didn't do everything that you could do for your employees, for them to be successful. And if you're an employee, I would argue that you shouldn't feel that way either. You would. You don't look.

Speaker 1: 24:36

If you are cutting corners, if you're not putting your booties on when you go in a house, if you're not checking stuff, if you're not going to check the ductwork and taking pictures and following the process, you're cheating yourself and you're cheating the company. And maybe you don't care about cheating the company, but you're cheating yourself and you're cheating the customer. And if you can live with that, hey, more power to you. But it's a better life if you just do the right thing. And so what I'm going to leave you with today is change your mindset, change how you're viewing your life, because if you're getting I said this before if you're getting the same result over and over, you got to change something. You know, if Tiger Woods, if his swing gets out of whack, what does he do? He changes the swing, he hires a different coach. That guy's got like five different golf coaches, which is kind of wild. Sees how he's one of the best in the world, but he's not.

Speaker 1: 25:43

We don't. Sometimes we can't see the issues. Sometimes we cannot see what's right in front of our face because it's our stuff, it's our situation. And so, look, I just want you to be a better person. I want you to be a better employee. I want you to be a better boss. I want you to be a better owner. I just want you to be a better person, because it's a better life that way. It's a more successful life, for sure. Just doing the next right thing. And so do me a favor, folks.

Speaker 1: 26:23

If you've gotten something out of this today, I want you to leave me a five-star review. Our reviews are slightly hard to come by, so today, go right now. You're already listening to the show. Just scroll down about Midway. You'll see where it says rate and review. Hit the five stars, write a few sentences. Tell me what you liked about this. Tell me if it upset you. Tell me if it didn't upset you. Tell me if it opened your eyes to how you're going to do things differently, better yet in the review. Tell me what you're going to do different. I want to know because I want you to get better.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Our industry has a bad name. We get oh, you're just a contractor trying to hose me out of money. I'm sick and tired of hearing that. So you've got to do better. You've got to make changes. If you want the industry to change, if you want people to view you differently, you've got to act differently. You can't keep acting like a shitbag and expect different results. It's not possible. So, guys, I appreciate you today, and we've got Jonathan Wispin coming up next week, which I'm super excited about. We've actually got some really, really dope people coming up Jesse Cloud, I can't think of who else right off the top of my head. We've got several lined up. But look, I appreciate you. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, make sure that you do See that five-star review and we'll see you next week.