The High Performance Edge Podcast
00:00:03 · S0
[00:00:03] S0: Welcome to The High Performance Edge, the podcast for contractors who lead with building science and want to turn that advantage into a stronger, more successful business. Whether you're in HVAC, insulation, solar, or home performance, we dig into strategy, sales, marketing, operations, hiring, and customer service approaches that power stable, more profitable companies. Hear from top contractors and industry experts as we explore what it takes to thrive as a very different kind of contractor. Here's your host, founder and CEO of Energy Circle, Peter Troast.
00:00:43 · Peter Troast
[00:00:43] S1: Hey, folks. Thanks for being here. There's a lot of buzz right now about the tech startups parachuting into our world. The Silicon Valley crowd whose motivation to scale retrofits is genuine, but who go to market in not so subtle ways promising to fix everything they say is broken about dealing with a contractor. The in home visit, the slow quote, the supposedly lousy customer experience. What's cool about today's guest is that he's a forty three year veteran of the contracting business who was running that playbook years before the techies showed up to disrupt the heat pump business. Larry Waters founded Electrify My Home in Northern California and built it on an unconventional idea for the time, go all electric only and stop rolling a truck to every lead that calls. He swapped the in home visit for a virtual assessment at a time when few in our industry were doing it and has maintained conversion rates that are everyone's envy. This episode is really about one of High Performance Contracting's critical challenges, How good companies differentiate themselves not just from venture capital finance startups, but also from the entire HVAC sector still doing things the old way. Larry's company fully embraces the house as a system, addresses the envelope and mechanicals together, and is thriving in a very competitive market. Many people tend to dismiss California as a rarified place that isn't replicable anywhere else in the country. Larry works in a part of California between the Bay Area and Sacramento, very definitively not the homeowner profile of Berkeley or San Francisco. Even though his brand is squarely about electrification and he does nothing else, only about 20% of his customers even mention carbon or climate. The rest just want better technology, a top quality buying experience, and a contractor who can clearly explain what sets them apart. Here's my interview with Larry Waters. Larry Waters, welcome. Great to have you. I've been very excited about having you on, because of how you have started Electrify My Home, how you positioned the company, and in particular, how, it relates to something that is all the buzz and discussion in the industry these days, which is the the the the rise of these companies coming out of Silicon Valley, sort of tech oriented startups that are here to kind of disrupt our industry.
00:02:56 · Peter Troast
And what I think is so fascinating about the Electrify My Home story is that you were kind of their model before they were... Before they existed. And so so I'm really, excited to to dig into a little bit of that history. So... But, but before we do that, I think just let's make sure that, you know, introduce yourself, introduce Electrify My Home, and, and then, you know, maybe dive in a little bit to that story of how you conceived of the model, you know, based on your past, you know, and, and what it, you know, what what it looks like today.
00:03:27 · Larry Waters
[00:03:27] S2: Well, Peter, I mean, you were involved in my earliest iteration of this entire thing because you built my website. So the... I've been in the trade about forty three years. I really started doing... I had ten years of commercial and so I had a good understanding of things, but then I started doing residential service. And I realized at some point that like I wanted to talk to the homeowners because it was just a better feel for me. And that morphed into getting into the service and sales side, and then which morphed into paying more attention to things, which brought up questions in my mind, which is why why I could fix an air conditioner, and apparently it was working by all the all the stats I could take off of it, but the but the homeowner was still uncomfortable. Yeah. So I always had the need to find into that. I stumbled upon BPI. I went through that whole program, and the sugar was just right in the Kool Aid, so I drank a lot of it. And I never went back like contractors a lot did. It was really a means to an end when I went through those classes because it was required for a specific program that was coming out of California. Right. Energy upgrade California, way ahead of its time, didn't do all that well. But I just... I figured out how to make houses more efficient. My customer reactions were great. My sales numbers went up significantly. And so I just kept going and learning more and learning more and learning more. And I aligned myself with some of the really smart people in this industry and just got as much information as I can handle, like Rich Chip would and some of those, the grandfathers of home performance. So I says, gonna go build this business. I'm gonna only electrify houses. Proud to say six years, I've never installed anything gas. I won't. We put a lot of caps on lines. And it's really worked out good. And I wanted to build it off of a foundation of what I thought was inefficient and I didn't like about the traditional HVAC industry. Yeah. And do it correctly. And I said, since I have this knowledge and all of these programs are coming out, whenever a program comes out for an incentive program, there's always some workforce education training funds available. And so I kind of went into that route too.
00:05:24 · Peter Troast
[00:05:24] S1: That's amazing. Yeah. That's great. I I guess I wanna, you know, just dwell a little bit on, you know, how visionary you were. I mean, today, you know, a decision to be an electrification only company might not seem all that, you know, abnormal. But but back then, that was a very bold move. Some some in the industry might say a reckless move. Say more about how you arrived at that decision and and, you know, made a, you know, a pretty very, very clear differentiation call.
00:05:56 · Larry Waters
[00:05:56] S2: I saw what was coming in California, and I said there's nobody that's gonna attack this the right way. I was very passionate about what I was doing. And I said, I'm gonna be two or three years ahead of the curve and I'm gonna start this thing that nobody's ever heard about. Nobody's gonna electrify my home. Come on. Right? But there are now people going, I need to electrify my home. And we knew, we had that conversation early on when we built a website and named the company. That part of my initial business model. But it was really, I didn't know how far it was going to go, but I knew there was going be a market for it at some point. I knew I was really good at... I'm a good salesperson and I'm a good engineer and I'm conscientious and I steer my customers in the right direction, sometimes to the detriment of my own profitability. But I knew that I could make this happen, but I also knew that I couldn't be that guy that starts his own business and thinks everything's going to be easy. I'm a realist. I knew when I started the business, somebody else was going to have to do the paperwork and I was not going to be able to do all the work myself and sell everything. And you know, there's only twenty four hours in the day and you got to sleep at some point. So when I formulated the business idea, I said, I know I can sell this. I infiltrated all the marketplace... Marketplaces of of the customer personas that I knew would help me build it on the beginning. Yeah. So I tapped into these markets. And basically, I went to meetings where people that were talking about heat pumps were, and I said, I'm your guy. I said, a lot of people can install heat pumps, but nobody else has the same vision you do for a fully electric California.