Owner Brad Huff, Operations Manager Jamie Robertson, and Their Talented & Dedicated Team Have Grown the Indianapolis-Based Service Business to $15-Million Business with Sights on Hitting $30 Million in the Next 3 Years. They’ve Achieved Consistent 30-Percent Annual Growth by Delivering Reliably Outstanding Service, Offering Unmatched Availability & Maintaining an Exceptionally Run Operation.
by Bob Houchin
The name of the company says it all. If you live in the greater Indianapolis metropolitan area, and you need help with a busted furnace, leaky water heater, or tripping breakers, call the guys in the distinctive red and yellow box trucks seemingly on every street corner. They’ll be at your front door before you know it—they’re Mister Quik Home Services.
The concept of the Mister Quick brand took root in Founder and President Brad Huff’s mind when he noticed a common request among customers calling the office for service. Everyone wanted to know how quickly a technician could arrive. For Brad, it opened his eyes to a unique marketing opportunity— and Mister Quik was born. People no longer ask if they can get help quickly—they call because they already know.
An expediated service promise may be the reason homeowners call, but Mister Quik has grown into an $18 Million business thanks to the level of service it provides. Not only are they quick, they’re always available and professional.
“We want to provide great service. We’re going to do what we say we’re going to do when we’re going to do it. We want to be available seven days a week, because in our industry, problems don’t happen when you want them to happen,” Brad Huff said. “We have people answering the phones live, all hours of the night. We have technicians available all hours of the night. We’ll be there in any weather, any time of day. And we’re open every day of the year, except Good Friday. Otherwise, we’re fully operational.”
There was time, not that long ago, when Brad’s business wasn’t known as Mister Quik, and it certainly wasn’t the business to call for residential service.
Mister Quik’s Beginnings
Brad’s beginnings were as an electrician. Prior to Mister Quik Home Services, there was Indy Connection Electrical Contractors. “I opened the business in June 2000. We had one or two trucks running around. We all had five different jobs,” Brad said with a laugh. “That’s how we got our start.”
As many contractors are prone to do, Brad chased the big, topline dollars in new construction, predominantly outfitting track homes. He soon ran into the aggravations, frustrations, and tiny margins that come with that scope of work.
In late 2004, Brad heard of a brand-new organization, Electricians’ Success International, and became one of its first members. “By 2005, we decided to go the service route. We downsized the company to myself and one other electrician. We started from scratch,” Brad remembered.
The name-change to Mister Quik soon followed, and with Brad’s passion for growing the business, he rapidly found success in residential contracting. Three years after joining ESI, he acquired an HVAC business and expanded into plumbing. The company continues to grow aggressively to this very day.
The Service Business Is a People Business
Years of tweaking and improving Mister Quik led Brad to a profound revelation, that all successful service contractors eventually discover: This is a people business. It’s extraordinarily helpful that you can arrive at a home quickly and have expanded service hours, but it’s the people you employ who make the difference. It’s the people who customers remember, and they’re the reason customers stay loyal, leave outstanding reviews, and recommend friends and family.
A quick search online reveals that Mister Quik has almost 1,500 Google reviews with a stunning average of 4.8 stars. “We try really hard, as a company, to be different from everyone else. It comes down to offering better, more complete services, but also having the best employees walking into customers’ homes. Having people on staff who care about other people,” Jamie said.
“I’ll give you a great, recent example. It was in the evening, and one of our plumbers and his helper noticed a stranded motorist who looked to be in some trouble. They pulled over and helped them get out of some pretty thick traffic; they pushed the car out of the road. The motorist called into the office and said, ‘I really appreciate what your guys did. They’re really some stand-up individuals. They didn’t have to do that, and I don’t even know what their names were.’”
“When that person called, that was the first we heard of it, too. Our guys didn’t come into the office and make a big deal about it. They helped this person because it was the right thing to do. We ended up figuring out who it was by tracking them down on GPS. We made sure to recognize those guys at our next meeting, and we gave them gift cards to Outback.”
“I feel like that’s the type of people, the culture, we have here. We have a great team,” Jamie stressed. “We celebrate when we hear things like that. Our guys feed off it. It motivates them to help someone.”
Great Service Is Consistent Service
“You have to have the right employees, obviously. Then they need to be consistent from call to call,” Jamie urged. “You want your customers to be just as impressed the fifth time you’re out to their home, as they were the first time.”
Jamie came to work for Brad in 2013. The two met through Success Group International connections years ago. Jamie owned, successfully operated, and then sold his own HVAC company prior to coming to Mister Quik. When the timing was right, Jamie jumped aboard.
It’s easy to see why Brad wanted Jamie’s talents. Over the course of our hourlong, in-depth discussion, there wasn’t an operational detail Jamie didn’t know—and know well. More than a few times, he emphasized the importance of executing the Mister Quik service system, and how it sets the company apart in their marketplace.
Mister Quik’s technicians in all three divisions utilize iphones with a proprietary app, which Brad had built, that works in conjunction with SuccessWare. Yet there are elements of the service call the company prefers to use paper. “We have inspection checklists,” Jamie said. “We also have a separate sheet that we call our ‘Facts and Findings’ sheet—it’s our options sheet. We always try to give people three options on every repair. That sheet is universal throughout our company—everyone uses it the same way.”
Every technician at Mister Quik also sells the same club membership—they call it the Shape Plan, as in “we’ll keep your house in shape.” Their Shape Plan comes with two HVAC visits and an electrical and plumbing inspection every year. It’s been one of the most effective tools at growing the business year after year.
“Our technicians do a great job for the homeowner. Then, they’re trained to ask the customer if they’d like to book their plumbing or electrical inspection right now,” Jamie explained. “It happens all the time when someone will remember an issue they’re having, and they’ll want us to come back out right away. Our tech calls dispatch and we book the next appointment right then and there.”
“Before we leave, we look for a way to go above and beyond for the customer,” Jamie added. “For example, our HVAC techs, they’ll wax the air conditioner, and they’ll wax the indoor unit. Those are the types of things people remember.”
Mister Quik Replacement Process
Should a customer need to speak with a selling technician about a new HVAC system, the Mister Quik sales system has also been uploaded to a tablet. “I had a really nice presentation book that I made, but this new system we use has been a really big help,” Jamie said. “It slows them down and forces them to go through the entire presentation. They can’t skip anything.”
Mister Quik’s selling technicians always offer between four to six replacement options. “Those options are completely dependent upon how customers answer the questions we’ve trained our technicians to ask,” Jamie shared. “We sell Daikin equipment. Once we get to variable speed indoor with 14 SEER or higher, they offer a 12-year parts-and-labor warranty that our customers really love.”
The company also private-labels their own equipment, as well, for more budget-conscious homeowners. “We call it our Mister Quik Comfort Series. It’s more cost effective. We’re able to meet people’s needs with something they can afford, and it’s a good piece of equipment with a good install,” Jamie added.
The tablet presents a price for each option, and it always is broken down into a financed, monthly amount. “The proposal gives a complete breakdown: the price, what the finance fees look like, what the payment is. Our guys always focus on the payment,” Jamie said.
Jamie estimated that up to 75 percent of Mister Quik’s work is financed. He and his managers train their technicians to offer it every single time a ticket exceeds $500. They have three different financing companies they will use. “We use GreenSky and then Service Finance as our secondary,” Jamie shared. “We also have a third-look, local finance company we’ll use. They work really, really hard to finance people off collateral.”
“You know, if we have someone who’s been a customer and a member of ours for a while, sometimes we’ll make a repair for free, just to get their equipment up and running so they can get some heat,” Jamie said honestly. “We don’t want to leave a family in an unsafe situation. It goes against what we’re about.”
Culture Built on Training
Both a service and sales system must be learned, and with an operation the size and scope of Mister Quik, to help ensure a consistent experience from customer to customer, Brad has always put an extremely high value on training. “Even for us managers, we’ve been through so much training,” Jamie stressed. “Brad is always looking at anything he can that he feels is going to make us better at our jobs and better people.”
Training begins your first day at Mister Quik. “Our onboarding process is similar in every department. We have specific guys who take new people under their wing. They ride-along with them for quite a while,” Jamie explained. “We want them to see how we expect them to approach the customer and implement our service system. They’ll see how the call comes to the techs, to how they close-out the call on our app, to how they reorder their parts.”
“During that entire time that they’re riding-along, our technicians are giving us weekly reports about how their apprentices are doing, what areas we might want to focus on with them, and how fast we can move them along,” he continued. “That way, if we know they’re struggling with something in particular, we can bring them in for some one-on-one training on that issue.”
How quickly new hires graduate into their own truck varies by trade and the individual’s talent and experience level. For those coming aboard as apprentices, the ride-along process determines if Mister Quik will invest significant resources into their long-term development. For those management deems worthy, the company will pay 100 percent of their technical training. HVAC apprentices go to Perfect Tech Academy in Dallas and their plumbing and electrical apprentices utilize local training schools. “We have five or six going to Perfect Tech very soon,” Jamie said.
Training never stops at Mister Quik, even after you’ve moved into your own truck. Five days a week, some type of training is being conducted each morning. On Mondays, HVAC selling technicians and plumbers who sell dig jobs have sales training. On Tuesdays, the entire HVAC department meets, along with Mister Quik’s sales manager and trainer, Daniel Eckerle. Wednesdays are plumbing trainings with Daniel, who will cover any number of topics from communication to leadership and more. Thursday is training for apprentices, and Friday is for electricians.
“During one of those training sessions each week, we will go over every step of our service system,” Jamie shared. “Right now, we’re working on building a more set curriculum for each week, but currently, we train based upon things or topics we see as relevant to our team.”
Mister Quik keeps their team accountable to what they’ve learned; yet they don’t rule with an iron fist. “We print off everyone’s numbers every week and hand them out. We have department and individual goals. We show them this is what you minimally have to achieve, and this is where your peers are,” Jamie said. “But we never beat them up about their average tickets—because the last thing we want is for them to feel pressured to sell. That wouldn’t be doing the right thing by the customer.”
Capture & Maximize Every Opportunity
No technician, no company, could perform at an exceptional level without the abilities of an exceptional call center. That’s precisely what’s been built at Mister Quik. The tone for each day is set by department managers—as they are the ones who set the boards in the morning. The dispatch team closely monitors and adjusts the boards where needed.
Six dispatchers operate during typical workday hours. Three more work evenings. All its dispatchers are dedicated to one particular trade—and most of the individuals have been with the company at least five years. “Lindsey Hannowsky has been promoted to our HVAC service manager now—she can diagnose a call before a technician arrives. She’s been with me 15 years, and she typically has trained our dispatchers. She does a great job at everything she does—a very sharp person.”
CCRs feeding dispatch have been trained to handle every type of caller for every department. “There are two people who specifically follow up on every lead we give them, except for HVAC equipment. So, if it’s for duct cleaning, new capacitor, a flapper,” Jamie explained. “Our sales manager makes sure his techs do their own follow up on the equipment. He prints off their proposals, and when they come in the office, they have to make those calls. We’ll only give them a day, because if it’s somebody with a no heat or no cool, we don’t want to give them a chance to call someone else.”
Once the technician or installer’s job is done, customers always receive a Happy Call from the office. Mister Quik has one individual who manages those. “She tries to call those people right away. So, she’s a pretty busy person,” Jamie said. “We try to get to those as fast as we can to head-off any concerns a customer may have. Address it immediately, and it doesn’t give a person a chance to get mad. And by doing the Happy Call, it gives us one last chance to get that homeowner to leave us a review if they haven’t done so already.”
Just like the technicians receive regular training, Mister Quik’s call-center manager, Mike Slapak, works regularly with his team to maintain their skills. “He’s relatively new to the company, and he’s doing a great job. He has an extensive sales and sales-management background, which is really nice to have when working with the call center. He’s been training with them a lot.”
Marketing & Managing by the Numbers
The call center must operate at peak efficiency. Every time the phone rings, those prospective customers are the product of hard-earned dollars spent. In particular, Brad works tirelessly to help ensure that Mister Quik gets the most value for its marketing budget.
“Marketing is definitely Brad’s baby. He’s 100 percent in charge of it. It’s what he really enjoys doing—building our brand, getting in front of new customers, retaining our old customers. He probably has the brightest mind of anyone I’ve been around when it comes to marketing in our industry,” Jamie said. “And I know he loves doing it, too.”
Mister Quik’s marketing mix consists of a variety of mediums. They’re highly invested into online advertising. “We also do a lot of television commercials—we’re on all three major networks with 15-second spots. I know he’s shooting new commercials right now,” Jamie shared. “We still do a lot of very targeted direct mail to specific zip codes we want to work in. We mail our current customers, too. Before long, we’ll be sending them Christmas cards.”
Mister Quik prides itself on offering exceptional services and employing great people who care. The business continues to succeed and grow because of the careful, critical eyes and attention of the company’s management team, lead by Brad and Jamie.
“Every morning at 10 o’clock the managers huddle. We see what we did the day before and see what the day looks like moving forward,” Jamie explained. “We get a spreadsheet with the DMR, and it’s broken down by department. We know where we are in comparison to our goals for the month, we know our percentage to that goal. It has calls that came in and calls that were closed. We have the cancellation percentage. We look at average tickets for every department. We look at our close rate on maintenance programs, and how many we sold. We look at a host of things daily,” Jamie said with conviction. “Based upon that meeting, we know if we need to turn our marketing off or turn it on. If we can’t get to people that day, why spend the money?”
“In the business, if you’re going to grow, you have to have the processes in place. And you must track your progress—from what happens in the field to your marketing and everything in between,” he added. “You have to make sure you’re never missing a thing. That’s what can throw you off your goals.”
Recruiting Employees & Changing Lives
Keeping call counts high, ensuring they’re converted into appointments, and those appointments turn into revenue is more important than ever for Mister Quik. The company has some incredibly aggressive growth goals. “We’re at $18 million now. We’ve been pretty consistently growing at about 30 percent a year,” Jamie divulged. “We’d like to be at $50 million in the next five years. We believe we can do it.”
Hearing the conviction in Jamie’s voice, there’s no doubting he believes the Mister Quik team is capable of achieving such a number. He also knows that means the company needs more of their distinctive red and yellow trucks with technicians and apprentices manning them. “Recruiting is something we focus on daily,” he said. “It’s probably our biggest priority.”
Mister Quik constantly runs ads on every job board imaginable. Recruiting coordinator Zach Johnston manages the ads and responds quickly to any potential candidate that catches his eye. He responds to those individuals and then asks them to complete a short 5- to 10-minute cultural-index survey. He wants to see if he or she fits what the company is seeking.
“We have, what I would call, a personality profile for every position in the company. There’s a certain type of person we know who does best in that job. We can tell if a person is a 50% match or an 80 % match,” Jamie said. “If a person matches well, he’ll ask them to come in for an interview.”
Managers of each department do the next interview. “I would say that every single manager in this company is doing at least three interviews a week,” Jamie shared. “We are constantly interviewing. We are constantly trying to bring on apprentices. We’ve found that we have the most luck with apprentices.”
“We’ve had chefs become apprentices. We have a guy from a very busy carwash company who approached us, trying to sell us on a membership; we recruited him, and he’s been outstanding. We’ve had the most luck in the retail world with apprentices,” Jamie said.
“When any of our managers see someone with retail experience, that sets a bell off in their mind. This could be someone,” he continued. “We’re constantly keeping an eye out, all of us. No matter where any of our managers are, if they run into an interesting person, whether it be a restaurant or anywhere, we’re giving out business cards.”
“We get a lot of people who come in because someone from the company referred them. We love that, because we like to think of this company as a big family,” Jamie said. “I’m always very proud when talking with new people, I tell them that they’re going to love working here. We have a gentleman who works for us now. He had spent the last four years at one of our biggest competitors. He said he felt like he was just working to bring home a paycheck. He’s been here for three months. He tells us all the time about how he loves the culture here. He wishes he’d made the change sooner.”
“That’s what’s so exciting—to see someone who maybe came from a tough retail job where they felt stuck, for example. They come here, work hard, and are willing to invest in themselves, we’ll invest in them. They can make a great living, have benefits, and a future. We all want to hit our company goals, for sure, but when you can see someone’s life is changed doing what we do, that’s pretty special.”