Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Victory Show.
Hey victors. Welcome to this week's Victory Show. If this is the first time you're joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books. And I had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultant founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books.
In my journey, I've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses hit a revenue plateau, usually around a million dollars, and they struggle to break through that. So on this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their business to new heights. And more importantly, how you can do the same. So get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your business and your life starting today.
Today's guest is a true innovator in business leadership and technology. Chad Lingefelt took Lockdoc Security from a small locksmith operation to an industry powerhouse, seamlessly blending security technology and digital content creation into a game changing business model. Now here's what's amazing about this. He started as a trainee technician in 2004 and he quickly revolutionized operations with a cloud based system, one of the first in the industry. He, he scaled the company and expanded into multiple divisions. But beyond business, he's passionate about people too. Loves to mentor entrepreneurs through his coffee break podcast and his business meeting online. And he does puts out a lot of educational content that helps leaders build thriving companies.
Now, the best part of this is Chad doesn't just talk about growth, he lives it. He's still the CEO. And from launching new ventures and acquiring businesses to teaching others how to scale and create a winning company culture, his insights are practical, they're powerful, and they're proven. He's built a company culture that thrives on innovation. And we're going to get into that because he's doing some really amazing stuff in his space and he's helping other business leaders do the same.
Beyond that, when he's not just leading his team, you'll find him enjoying a great espresso or spending time with his family or flying drones. And out of four of them, two have actually survived. And we'll cover those stories in a minute too. So get ready for a conversation packed with some insights, strategy and real world leadership lessons. Chad, welcome to the show today. Thank you for being here, Travis.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. That's a great introduction. I don't know that I can live up to that, but it was.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Well, if all else fails, we'll pivot to drones and we'll have a good conversation about that.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Yeah, the drones thing is funny. It's actually, I would say that drones have probably been replaced over the last couple of years with golf. You can most likely find me on a golf course.
I did have to give up my drone piloting because I kept crashing them frequently.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Did you get some good pictures and footage? That's the most most important part.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: No, it's one of the, one of my most favorite video clips that I have.
In downtown Charlotte, which is where we're located in Charlotte, North Carolina, we have this building, the Duke Energy Tower.
Probably not relevant to anybody. We're a, we're a small town that tries to be a really big city. And this is a really cool building at the very top of it. It's got this really cool triangle peak and LED lights and all this stuff. And I was trying to fly this drone illegally to the to note in downtown Charlotte to capture this building on. I think I picked the most windy day out of the entire year that I was going to try to do this.
And I was fighting this drone and I do not know how I was able to actually get it to come back down. But I do have a really cool clip of this drone flying up just super close to this building and capturing some really cool footage of it.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: That's awesome. I always say I'm holding out on the drones until they have the full life size 4 copter drone that I can sit in and fly around and then I'm all for it.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: I would. Yes, that is of interest to me as well.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: So we were talking earlier and this is what I love about you.
I love when somebody's a CEO and a business owner that really sort of started at the ground level and just through, you know, being savvy and maybe having a skill set that just uniquely fits a situation, you end up kind of rising to the top. And so what I love about this is when we were chatting something that, to me it was a little bit interesting, a little bit shocking is that, you know, you're, you're sort of an industry powerhouse in the locksmithing industry, but you had gotten your start out of high school in radio.
So let's talk about a little, a little bit about that. What were you, what, what, what took. Was that just because that was a job available or did you want to be, you know, like the next Ryan Seacrest, man?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Well, I don't even know if Ryan Seacrest was. I guess he was. I don't know. Anyways, I. So here's the, you know, fun fact that I don't even know that I've ever really shared before on a recording. But when I was six, seven years old and I actually have a photo somewhere, I found it a couple of months ago when I was 6 or 7. I got a Studio 8 little recording setup that was a Christmas gift and it was, had a cassette recorder, familiar with those cassette recorder on there with a little boom microphone on it and I could record my own radio shows. Had a little sound effects things and there are, there are tapes all over the place that I'm sure my mom could pull out of some box somewhere of, of recordings that I had done. And I had an early fascination. There was a small town radio station.
My grandfather actually used to have a radio program years and years and years ago. And I would just always found myself enamored with audio equipment. I was in recording studios at an early age, messing with, with equipment and wiring, rewiring and just, you know, it was just always in my bloodline for whatever reason, messing around with audio equipment and audio gear.
And so when an opportunity came, you know, when I was 17 years old to work at a radio station making $10 an hour, I was ecstatic. I thought I had my dream job because, you know, I got to mess around with audio equipment that I was very fascinated with, very familiar with. And then also got to tie in computers, which I was a big computer nerd. My uncle helped me build my first computer when I was like 11 years old.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: All right. Yeah, you were a nerd.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I was, I was in her audio equipment, computers. And then I got to bring all that together in radio. So it was, you know, something that I was very passionate about early on and making and bringing systems together and I guess bringing some type of an entertainment around it. But just understanding how systems work together was always kind of a thing of mine.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Wow, I love that.
So while you were with the radio station then you kind of were at the cusp of of all of that, Right. They were bringing in systems, they were bringing in streaming, they were bringing in computers.
And so because you were the guy that kind of had that knowledge, they were, you were the one kind of helped set all of that up.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So when I, when I first got there, they were introducing a new automation system and I had a very rudimentary job. So I don't want to over like painted too bigger than what it was, but I had to actually record in real time songs into an audio into a Digital audio recorder. So this was before, you know, now if you, if you had a CD, which I don't even know who anybody uses CDs anymore, but when you had a CD, you pop it in and you could rip it so you could export the digital files off of it in no time. They did not have the functionality to do that back when I was starting this. So I had to record everyone in real time, which was painstaking, but that was my entry into it. And then they started to. There was this talk around streaming. How can we get the.
Because it's a small AM radio station in this very small city. How can we expand the coverage? Well, there's streaming now. Well, no one really knew how to set up a website. Nobody knew how to connect the streaming aspect of it. And so that was kind of my forte. I knew how to build websites because I taught myself how to do that when I was 12 or 13 years old.
And I was able to start to pull all, all of the experiences together. And then we launched streaming. We were one of the first radio stations in that genre to have a streaming website.
And it really just kind of launched that whole thing for us. And so it was really cool to be a part of that and to be able to launch it. But again, it was just a bunch of nerd stuff that I had taught myself or learned over the years as a, as a kid. And then it actually became practical to apply into a job.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: So how do we make the, the transition from, from radio into locksmithing?
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it was, it was. I, I joke about it a lot. There was, there's some real, real components to this. But I joke about it and say I was, I was hitting a burnout. When I was in my early 20s.
Some people were like, yeah, yeah, that's a bit extreme. But it was, I was, I was working a lot. I was newly, you know, married a young adult.
And I just, I felt like I had taken on so much and there was no way out.
And so I said, you know, just scrap it all and I'm going to go install, do it. Be a cable installer or work at ups. Because I saw those as jobs where I could just clock in, do the task and clock out. And I thought that's what I wanted because I had moved through a lot of different environments and every environment. When I was 16 years old, I was working at a grocery store.
And within three or four months, I moved from a cashier to a customer service manager.
So there was just this kind of consistent thing where I always Took on more responsibility at a very rapid pace. And I just. I wanted to not do that anymore. I just wanted to be able to check out. So that's how I moved over into the locksmith world. Because there was an opportunity that became available that I felt like was going to be that rookie technician where I could just show up, do my thing, and then go home at the end of the day and be done with.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: It, not think about it anymore. Be good.
So, all right, so what's interesting about that is that, you know, you went into it thinking this is just going to be a job, not necessarily thinking about it as a career. But now here we are 20 years later.
So let's talk a little bit about the evolution. So what, what did that look like? So you started obviously, just at the ground, the, you know, the ground floor, learning how to. To open up locks. And how did you. How did this sort of evolve over time?
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Man, it's wild. And there's so many different stories that I can pull out of my head when we, when we start talking about this, but I remember, and it goes back to now that we're sitting here having this conversation, right? This realization that for whatever reason, over my, I guess, existence, I have had a knack for observing, understanding, and diagnosing systems and operation processes at a very detailed level. It's. It's just been something that comes naturally to me, and I never really understood that before. I just thought everybody.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: That's a natural nerd trait. That's pretty good there.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: I just assumed that everybody else saw the same thing.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: When you're 12 years old and you're building your own computer, you. You have to understand systems or it won't work.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Correct?
[00:12:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, from a young age, your brain was already like, hey, this is, you know, A goes to B, that goes to C, that makes D. So. And.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: And I just assumed that it was that everybody processed information the same way. And, and, you know, later on in life, I realized that that wasn't the case. So anyway, I was early on, first couple of years in the business, I was. I was watching and just observing some challenges that we were having. There were. And I want to be very clear, at that time, there were five employees. I was the fifth employee that came on. Two of them worked in the office. Three of us were technicians. Right. So it was a very small organization.
And I started asking a lot of questions and understanding, doing math, figuring out kind of where we were from a sales perspective because we didn't have a lot of good reporting. We didn't, you know, it was, we, we had.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Pretty typical for a small business.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Yes. We had people that called as we showed up, we did the thing. We most of the time sent them a bill and some of the time we got paid for it. So it was like, hey, it seems like we've got a couple of breaks in our operations here. And it looks like we're tabulating at around this amount of revenue. And I think at that time we were about $800,000 in revenue. And I was like, it seems like our biggest breakdown is with the ability to get quotes out effectively.
So people would call us and ask us to do stuff and then we would look at it and say, yes, it's going to cost us amount of money. And we would have to formally put together a quote for them. Well, that was a very time intensive process.
Two to three weeks that it would take us. Oh yeah. And so, you know, once we started going through the process, I was like, I feel like that is one area that we could trim our time down on drastically if it was one person's dedicated, you know, role.
Well, again, five people.
It's going to be hard to dedicate one of those people to just doing those quotes like in that theory.
And so anyways, you know, fast forwarding through a couple of years, we decided to start hiring some additional technicians. And you know, we grew up to, I think about seven, eight people in the organization.
And then it was like, okay, we were really, we had a really good thing going. We were providing good service, we had a good reputation. Our biggest flaw was it took us so long to do proposals, so we were good at the service side. We just weren't good at the project or, you know, larger, larger ticket opportunities because they took a quote.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: And so how much, how much revenue do you think that was costing you because of that?
[00:15:08] Speaker B: I mean, at that point, you know, we were, we were probably just at a million dollars in revenue. And you know, based off of our current metrics, that probably was a quarter million dollars a year that we could.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Have another 25% that it was costing you.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And on top of that, we were still doing the quotes. We just were doing them two to three weeks after we looked at them. And then that was drastically reducing the approval rate. By the time we provided the quote, maybe they had already gotten the work done by somebody else.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: So we still were dedicating the time to do it. It just wasn't turning into any fruit.
So.
So we said, hey, what if we had a couple of different Things that we were trying to figure out. But what if I kind of came off the road for two days a week? So I'll run a service truck three days a week. Two days a week, I'll go do sales and basically turn the quote same day.
Well, that literally lasted. And my memory is kind of loose around that time frame. So let's, you know, I want to be as honest as I can. We said that we were going to do that, and I feel like it lasted about two months before I went five days a week doing quotes.
Because what was ironic, when we actually gave people quotes in a timely manner, they approved them, and then we had to go do the work.
And so the demand for me to go out and do more quotes just increased drastically.
So now I'm a salesperson, and I'm a operations person because I'm having to do the purchasing and the ordering. And I was. I'm a terrible salesperson, by the way, but salesperson, terrible purchasing. There's a lot of the roles that I did through this growth area that I'm terrible at, but it was the roles that needed to happen for that, that transition.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: So, I mean, was the, was. Was everybody sort of shocked at, like the increase in revenue just from doing that one simple thing? Even though it was two days a week, was it a pretty noticeable boost in the revenue right out of the gate?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Well, if, if we had good tracking on it, we probably could say it was. It was enough noticeable that we, we felt it because we were sending out quotes before and we would get some approvals.
But it was, it changed from. We would send out a quote, we would get an approval, send out a quote given, get an approval. It was, you know, it went from maybe 20% approval ranking up to like 65% over that period. Because we were, it was so fast. Yeah, if you, if you turn a quote, we were turning quotes where it was taking two weeks down into less than two hours to send somebody a quote, and then they would approve it that same day.
And when that happens. Right. When you, when you see that happen in real time, it really changes your perspective.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: So the demand changed and we just started pushing those opportunities a lot faster.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: So how. How much did the, how did the.
The company scale from that point? And at what point did. Did you not just you, but the company realize you being in an operations, in a sales position wasn't the most optimal place to be?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: That that portion actually took a while.
We hit, you know, a million dollars, a little over a million dollars in revenue. I'VE I've got a tracker somewhere I could pull up. But it was, I believe, 2009, 2010 era. And then we were, we were basically hiring technicians because that was our biggest hurdle, is trying to hire the technicians. And the challenge that we hit, we. We got to a point. So in our industry, just for clarity, in our industry and a lot of service industries, I've found to be about the same for every employee. Number of employees, not number of technicians, but number of employees. You can.
You. They generally will create about $150,000 in revenue now.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Back in 2010, it was probably like $125,000. So there was a direct correlation. You could literally say, how many employees do you have? I've got 10. Okay, so you do just about, you know, 1.2 million. That's actually pretty close. So it's, it's was a kind of a direct calculation now. So I, I had created this formula because I was able to figure that part out, and I was like, okay, so we just add, you know, one to two technicians a year, and here's where our scale will continue to grow. The one thing that I didn't know because I'd never been in a growth operating scale before, was that you actually have to have managers. You have to have.
Then you have to have more salespeople. Well, then you have to have administrative people, and then you have to have somebody to train people when you hire them. And that all turned out to be a lot more than I. Than I expected.
But it was all part of the growth process. So we hit a point between 10 and 12 employees, and we got stuck. It was like this ceiling that we hit. So again, back to my math, you know, you're 1.5 million in kind of revenue. And we would hire a person, and then we would lose a person, and we would hire a person, and then we would lose two people. Then we would hire two people, and we, we just kind of kept getting stuck between that 10 and 12 employees.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
So weird. I don't know why that pattern is, but I, you know, I've talked to a couple of thousand people over the last few years, mostly off of LinkedIn, and that, that seems to be the spot. 10, 10. 10 to 12 employees is where people sort of get hung up. I just, I guess there's just a natural growth curve that happens there. But it's fascinating. In every industry I can think of that seems to be like the big sort of sticking point.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: The first one, one. One of the things that I've found Over time, as I started reading more books on leadership and, and trying to grow, I, I, you know, I wish I would have, I wish I would have read this and learned this back in 2012.
It took me a long time to get there. But there's a typical number of people that an individual can support and it's, it's like between four and six where you can really support that and have direct reports and, and be successful with it.
And I was at the, I was stretched there, right? So again, I had a business partner, so we did a lot of things in conjunction with each other, but I was, I was kind of the guy that, you know, the face at that, at that time that everybody was dealing with. I was the one that was doing the interviews and hiring and training, and I was the one interacting with people well. My bandwidth was limited through that.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: And so, so you, so you, so you got the radio thing and took on too much, and then you're like, I'm tired of doing too much. So you went to a new job to CL Lock in. And within a number of years you were.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: And I literally hit that wall again. And I, I looked at. It was about six years in and I said, I had a guy that approached me and he said, this was before I was in an ownership capacity with Lock Doc, but he approached me and said, hey, you know, I've got an opportunity within my company in the IT department. Would, you know, would you be interested? And it was actually a substantial pay raise for me at that time.
And I looked at it because I was at that point where I was like, man, really, I've got a lot of responsibility and I'm. And I'm it. I feel like I'm stretched beyond what I'm actually.
I feel like there's more value there than what I'm actually getting.
So I had to have a self evaluation and my wife and I had a lot of conversation around it, and it was very appealing. But the decision that we came back to was I felt like Lock Dock was the place that I could grow the most and that I could apply the biggest level of value for who I was.
And so, but, but what I had to do at that point was figure out how to get myself in order. I had to learn how to be a leader. I had to learn how to be a manager. I had to learn how to do all that stuff. I didn't go to college. I don't have a master's in business administration.
I learned all of this stuff through making a lot of mistakes.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Boots on the ground is the best experience.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: And so it was at that point where I read a transformational book. It's actually on the shelf behind me, but it's called Turn the Ship around by David Marquet. And it really unlocked this whole thing in me. Like, wow, you're doing a lot of things wrong. And there is actually a structure by which you can grow and you can manage and lead and, and also get out of the way. And so it was, it was a transformational time for me, you know, for about a 24 month period where I was just ingesting all of this information because I needed to be better for. I needed to be a better individual so that I could lead better for the company.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Sure.
Well, it's interesting that you naturally learned that you got to a point where I don't have the skills to get me where I need to go and I need to figure that out.
We were having that conversation before we started today, where I've worked with some pretty big companies where the main people, the face of the company are marketers or copywriters and they're great at making it rain money, but behind the scenes and a team of 20 people and they had no business management skills. So front face was awesome. All the money was pouring in, but the backside was chaos. Um, but a lot of times what it equated was is that there was also the sort of the false equivocation of, well, I can make it rain money so I can run a successful business. And it's like those are two different skills.
Yeah, yeah. So when, when did the conversation start about you becoming a owner of the, of the company?
[00:25:32] Speaker B: So there was, there was two major shifts. One, I had a conversation at that time.
At the time, the, there were two people that owned the company and one of them was older. And I had approached him with a conversation because I was trying to figure out kind of our next big growth opportunity.
And he said something to me along the lines of, well, I'm kind of comfortable where we are right now. I don't think we need to grow that much more because it'll become more complicated.
And that was just one of those conversations that didn't sit well with me because, yeah, I was a young 20 something year old individual.
I wanted to grow.
Now I didn't have an aspiration of being at that point in time a multimillionaire or having a big house or doing any of these types of things. I just knew that there were people out there, there were customers out there that needed our products and our services, and we could impact them in a positive way if we answered the phone and actually said, yes.
And this individual is basically saying, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
I'm good with the ones we have.
New people are not really an opportunity.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So interesting. I, you know, that was one of the things that we didn't talk about. But, you know, when I. When I start the show and I say, oh, a lot of companies, they get to the point where it's six to 10 employees and they sort of get stuck at a million dollars. You know, the huge chunk of them get to that point where they're like, I'm good. Yeah, right. And so I think that's interesting that, that you're your own. The owner was like, yeah, I know, we're good. I don't why. We don't need to get any bigger.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Yep.
And so I went to the other owner and I said, hey, here's the thing.
I see that there's a really good opportunity here. I think that we have a way to grow.
There's a problem with the person that's answering the phones because they're basically blocking additional opportunities.
So I think we are better off to pay that person to sit at home.
I'll take on that responsibility, and we can grow.
And that was a short story, a summary of a lot of conversations that.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Ultimately turned into one of the owners was the person answering the phone. So they were like, purposely turning work away.
Dang.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: And so, you know, I said, hey, I think this is a possibility. There's a lot of complexity around what I'm saying. I'm short, of course. Yes, brevity's sake. But so that turned into a buyout of that individual and over that period of time, some transfer of equity to myself. And then over time, I grew my equity position. But it was around that time where we said, hey, there's growth opportunity here. There's lots that we can do as a company, but we can't do it.
I can't run forward while somebody is actively holding onto the strap backwards.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: It reminds me that. That the device they use in track and field, that they. The guy who's sprinting and there's somebody's holding on the ropes while you're running in place.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Yes. And so we said, hey, let's. So it was. There was a lot of complications around getting to that point, but once we broke through that, then, you know, it. It really opened the floodgates up for us because we were in a position to say yes to A lot. Now I will say over the years we have had to learn how to say no to a lot of, so that we could be more focused in our opportunities. But that was in that middle stage of a business where we were saying yes to a lot of things because we didn't quite know what we didn't want to do yet. And we just needed opportunities and we needed to, to grow our customer base at that point.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: So for you as a leader, like where.
And I should say what. So after you came on board and had an equity stake, like what did, what did the growth look like over those, you know, those next two, three years?
[00:29:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So once we figured out the whole 10, 12 person max and then we, the next big growth phase, because it was just kind of moderate, I'd say moderate growth.
You know, we were 25, 30% year over year.
And honestly, you know, I had a lot of people that came through the organization at that time that I have stayed really close with and stay in good communication with. Now they came and they left and there were a lot of it because they felt like there was no growth opportunity. And they felt like. And I remember there was this one pivotal conversation.
Super great guy, love him to death.
Worked with me for years and really helped to handle a lot of our installations and did a fantastic job. And he walked in my office one day and said, hey, and put in my notice. And I'm like, man, you know what, what happened? What's going on? And he said, I just don't see that there's ever going to be any other positions in this company besides a technician.
There's you, there's your business partner and then there's technicians. And I don't see that ever changing.
And it was, you know, somebody could have just taken a baseball bat and smacked me across the face and it would have felt a lot better.
But it was an eye opening situation for me that said, you've got to figure out a way to create an organization here and a growth strategy. And so we had to.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: What an interesting insight when, you know, 10 years earlier you were in the radio station going, I just don't think there's any place I'm going to grow here.
And that's even like, why you leaving? Right. And so now you're on the other side of that desk here, somebody telling you that, going, wait a minute.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Yep. And it wasn't it and it, and, and to the point, right. It wasn't that. That was what was we were trying to do. It's just what was not being communicated. And so, you know, I learned a valuable lesson. Two really, probably two valuable lessons. One, I needed to have a strategy and a plan that was visible. And then two, I needed to communicate that strategy.
So shortly thereafter, I remember it was a pivotal, pivotal point in our business.
I, you started hiring some more people and we hired somebody because at that point I had shifted over to effectively running the operations of the company by running dispatch, answering the phone, dispatching and then doing partial sales. It was a nightmare for a period of years.
If from. I want to try to make up some dates here, maybe from 2013 to, to almost 2015.
I did that for almost two years. And it was, it was to a point where it was difficult to take a bathroom break. It was difficult to go to lunch. You know, it was just, it was non stop from seven in the morning to seven at night. Just.
It's crazy. And, but it was the, it was the energy that needed to be put into the business at that particular point. But I did hit a breaking point and said I've got to get somebody in here to answer the phone so that I can, I can go sell and I can hire people and train people because I just couldn't do it. So we, we brought somebody in to do that, which was a game changer. Game changer. He is still with us to this day. He's now our branch manager for Charlotte.
Fantastic individual that has just really worked well and grown with us.
But he, he came in and that gave me just like this, this pause in the day where I could breathe and think and focus on sales. So now I put all of my energy in sales and we're, we're now boom. Okay, now let's go. 45% increase this next year because I'm out there just selling.
But the problem that we ran into at that point was I was also project managing. So any big sales that we did, I was the person making sure that it got done. While that was happening, I wasn't selling. So then we got into this big crazy valley where we had some really, really high highs and really low lows.
But during that period, to kind of conclude back to my point, I one morning came in, had been thinking a lot about what we, what we needed to do as an organization. And I used to have this big whiteboard.
It was like a, the whole wall in my office was painted with like whiteboard paint so I could draw on it. And so I drew out an entire organization chart, figmented organization, organization chart of how I thought the business should be structured moving forward.
And at that time, we had 15 employees, and I had posted out about 30 positions on this org chart.
And my business partner walked in and he said, yeah, it looks good, but we'll never be able to do that. There's. There's no way we'll be able to hire that many people and be able to afford it.
And I was like, well, that's a. That's a shame that you would have that opinion, but, you know, we're going to figure it out anyway.
And then a couple of other people walked in and they were looking at it and they were like, what is this position? What is this position? What is this position? I started explaining it, and they were like, oh, well, I want to do that position.
Whenever we're ready to hire that position, I'd like to take that position.
And I was like, you know, my mind was just kind of melted of.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Oh, we already have the people, we just correct.
[00:35:31] Speaker B: It was. And then I learned that lesson of getting this, the vision in front of the team. And the moment that I did that, there was a handful of people that were excited.
Their energy around the business was reinvigorated. And they were like, yeah, okay, well, let's go hire some more technicians. We can train them. And then once they're trained, I can go take that position, you know. And so they're now helping to do the recruiting part because they see that there is a future. And now I'm sitting back there going, man, if I would have just had this when that guy walked into my office, it was the catalyst to get us there.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: That's so. You know, a few few episodes ago, I interviewed Tom dowd. He's the CEO of F45. And he. He was ran with GNC for a long time. And you're going to get the question that I asked him later. But one of them, we were talking about it and he was saying that the.
When we were get diving into, like, when was GNC and when was F45, both of them having really hard time struggling. And he said it was because the top wasn't clearly communicating the direction to the employees. And so you ended up having a diffusion of focus.
So it's interesting that you were. They were like, oh, yeah. Like, even though they're in the other room, if you're not. And it's interesting though, because you've got so many things going on, you feel like you're communicating it. Right. But then it's not. It's not. When they have those conversations, you realize, like, oh, I'm not communicating in a way that they can hear so well.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Years later, I mean, eight. Eight years later, I came across this really cool tool, is a kind of a personality assessment of sorts. But it's a. It's a program called Culture Index. And the individual that we work with came in and did this assessment with me and my leadership team, and she diagnosed this whole thing and she's like, yeah. So, you know, Chad has the ability to see far into the future and really set kind of a vision and a strategy and. But he's going to tend to under communicate the details. So he's got an idea of where he wants to go, and he probably thinks that he's telling you where he's going to go, but he's not giving you all the information, not because he's trying to withhold it from you, but just because he's probably said it in his head. He just hadn't got it out of his mouth. And I was like, oh, wow, that's.
That's so true. And it. It really became. Was a pain point early on through growth because I was unaware of it. Like, like you said, you know, I thought I was getting it out there, I thought I was communicating it, but it obviously wasn't clear to everybody else.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Well, when you're. I don't know if you've ever read the book Traction by Gina Wickman and the whole EOS protocol. Right. That. That was the book that really changed my business where I was like, oh, because I'm a visionary and I spent a long time on my business trying to be the implementer. And so, you know, the end result is there's 37 half finished projects. And I'm like, what's the deal?
And I was like, oh, I gotta find somebody that can do that, because that's not my thing.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a book called Free the Idea Monkey that I read years ago.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Free the Idea Monkey. All right. I like the title already.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Yes. And it was the first one that unlocked it because it broke down the kind of partnership around Walt and Roy Disney, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, different things like that. And I was like, oh, okay, Well, I can see concept of partnership. And then I was opened up to Traction years ago, read that, understood the kind of concept, and then read all of the series of books around Traction. The one that really kicked it for me was, I think it's called Get a Grip.
It's. It's sitting back there on the bookshelf, but Get a Grip and it really talks about the elements of that visionary and integrator. And at times, certain people can do visionary and integrator simultaneously.
One is not going to be as effective as the other at that time. And it typically can be done for short periods of time.
And the reason that I bring that up is in 2020 and 2021, 2022, I felt myself slipping into this less visionary, more integrated role. Well, there was a worldwide pandemic, say.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: I don't know why, some sort of weird shift in business during that time.
[00:40:02] Speaker B: We pretty much thought we were going to lose everything.
But the.
Once we. Once. Once I identified that in myself and said, oh, crap, I have really fallen back into this integrator role, which is the thing that I am least comfortable with and causes the most just grind for me.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: But I was.
Then I was like, okay, well, let me shift back over here to the middle ground and try to do both. And. And I was, you know, functioning. Let's just say that I was functioning. And then I hit the wall that one day and I came into our team and I said, look, here's where we are. And it was. It was wild because I had also started a book club in our organization at that period of time. And I know I'm bouncing all over the place here, but I started a book club and we were reading this series of books as an organization. So now there's, you know, 15 people of the 35 at the time that were reading this book, of this series of books on traction. And they. They're all seeing it as well. They're like, okay, so Chad's the visionary, but he's in an integrator role right now. And this is why everybody's wanting to beat their head against the wall. And so when I walked in to our meeting one day and I said, hey, guys. Okay, I feel like I've been being the integrator and trying to be involved in this aspect of the business for the past 18 months. And I really think I've hit the wall. Like, one, I'm going to go take a vacation because I need a break.
Two, when I come back, this is what I'm expecting.
And I said, and also I'm going to find somebody that can come in and be the integrator. It's going to take some time, but that's what we're going to do because we will function best whenever that is the case. I can live in the visionary role and we can have somebody in the integrator role. And everybody in the company Was, yes, we agree.
Let's make it happen.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: One person was like, finally, God.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: And so that was like kind of that next shifting point where, you know, it, it when, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, those different levels of revenue marks that people hit, it's ultimately that the, the person is being a visionary and an integrator and they can't manage both of them effectively. Well, they've got to, they've got to let go of one or the other.
And oftentimes that, that practitioner that's really good at the skill set may actually need to be the integrator and he needs to hire a visionary to come alongside of him. And that's not a bad thing. It's just that's how life is.
And I always joked I was never a good locksmith, I was never a good installer. Like I was barely good enough to get by. But the operational side was more of my forte. And the thing that I was excited.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: About, I love it. So we talked about a little bit earlier where you did something really innovative, at least from my perspective, being an outsider, being innovative in the, in the locksmithing space is that you, you created a content creation arm and you also created an innovation lab.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: And those are two things that I don't think I would ever think of when it comes to locksmithing. So how did that come about? And let's talk a little bit about how that impacted your overall business.
[00:43:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so. So going back to, you know, like what I talked about before, I'd always had a fascination with audio equipment, video equipment. It's always been a passion of.
I have just found myself in this side projects all the time with it in 2016, 2017. Ish. I just kind of got the wild hair one day to start creating videos to try to promote some stuff in our business.
And it originally started out by trying to create product videos to highlight some of the products that we installed.
And it just hit me one day, I was like, this is boring. And. And I had this realization that nobody that is a customer of ours actually cares about these products.
They just want their door to work. They want it. You know, the summary that I've told a lot of people is most of our customers want, want to know that they can keep the bad people out and let the good people in when they're supposed to. And then when their door doesn't work, they just want it to work again, you know, but they're not really fascinated by the door closer and the operator and the lock and all that stuff.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: How many tumblers are in there and what the metals made out of.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: And that's our. That's our thing that we get nerdy about. And so I just had this shift of, you know, what.
What the people that are making the buying decisions for our customers are people that are managers, that are leaders, that are maybe business owners, you know, well, that's what I am.
What if I just started to create content that was interesting to me, and potentially it might be interesting to those people. And so I just grabbed a camera, you know, a little. I probably still have it floating around here somewhere, little camera, and started recording these vlogs around what we were doing in the business, not what the installs that we were doing, but just how we do team meetings, this new dashboard that we just put up so that we can track our daily activities.
You know, my philosophy on customer service, this and that and the other. And just started posting them out on YouTube, post them out on Instagram, post them out on Facebook.
And I started getting comments and responses from people, and people were calling me, industry people were calling me, but our customers were calling as well. And I'll never forget one time, this was after we had a dedicated outside salesperson. They had a meeting set up with a. With a large customer of ours, and they invited me to come because, you know, whatever. Wanted to just be part of the conversation. So I showed up and the customer said. He leaned over to me. We were sitting at lunch, and he leaned over to me, said, hey, I know we have to talk about this stuff, but before you leave, I have some questions here about that video that you posted.
And I was like, really? And he opens up his notebook and he's got six questions about this video that I posted around.
I'm trying to remember what it was at that time, but it around, I don't know, some video that I posted up. And I was like, man, this is incredible.
So anyway, so I kept doing that, and then that video, those videos turned into a podcast because we had some people saying, love the video.
Can't really watch the video at work, but if you were to put this in a podcast form, I would listen to it. So we started a podcast that started. Took on a life of its own, and it took a lot of my time and demand.
So I had a buddy that I worked with on side ventures and side projects around audio and video equipment. And he had 15 years experience in the AV world and live video production, all this. And I said, hey, he had just gone off and started a Freelance project.
And he worked when he wanted to and you know, kind of had this opportunity to had some flexibility. I said, hey man, what would it take to bring you on to our company and for you to help start making content for us that's actually professional looking and one that'll, that'll take 15 hours a week off of my plate. I can go work on growing the business, we can make better content. And then as a side.
So that was kind of the thing. And then once I started processing, I was like, I'm not going to be able to afford this.
Like I, I'm, I'm a, I'm a, I don't know at that time, $3 million company and I can't afford to pay a dedicated content.
So the concept was, well, what if we subsidize him by coming on board by doing work for outside clients, Video content for our industry.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: So you'll office it as a service so that you can pay for your service?
[00:48:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so it worked. And we brought him on in the summer of 2019, I believe, or 2018 and January of that next year we were on a plane to up north to meet with one of our manufacturers to talk to their marketing, entire marketing team to start shooting video content for them. Wow.
Now there's a lot of other stories associated with that, but that unlocked the ability for me to one, afford a full time content creator and then start to purchase the equipment that we needed.
That blossomed into a lot of other things for us. The pandemic shifted some of that for us. And then we moved into the app development portion of it along that same timeline. And so we just kind of developed the whole.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: That's when you're sort of your innovation lab started to go. So let's talk a little bit about that because I find, I find the concept innovative in and of itself.
So what was the original goal with that? And then I know you've got some really kind of cool stuff going on for your industry. So let's talk a little bit about what, what's coming out of that.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: So like everything that I just kind of described to you for the past little bit of time here is it started with some wild hair idea that I had, wild brain idea. And then if it got legs. And you mentioned it earlier, right, there's 39 projects happening and not none of them are completed.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: So that's because I was trying to integrate them, that's why.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Same thing, right? So I had all of these amazing ideas. They were all the best ideas ever. Just never could get them off the ground.
So one of the things way back when I found the ability to start documenting our key records, which is something that's unique to our, to our industry on a digital platform. The historical way to do that was on a piece of paper in a vault.
You know, very complicated, One person kind of managed, created limitations, it slowed down processes, all that stuff. So I found a way to store it securely on a cloud based website that was effectively, if you can imagine what Google Sheets is now. I found this product back in 2009 or 2007 and we started using it as effectively a really powerful Google Sheets, which Google Sheets didn't exist at that time.
And that blossomed into a lot of other things which ultimately moved into us creating our own work order management web app and all kinds of things.
But it got to a certain point and it was well above my limitation. So you know, I'm, I'm now trying to figure out how to write code and all kinds of other stuff which is just way tipping out of my, my skill set. So we ended up hiring a app developer and a code developer on staff.
And then I got a really cool opportunity to work with some smart people and lay out this is what I think we should do. This is the vision of where we need to go.
I don't know how to get there, I don't know how to do it. So they started coming in and bringing, bringing the tools and resources to be able to make it happen. That has fast forwarded now to I have a, a team of, of four people that I work closely with in our, our lab company. One is an inner, one is the content creation which it's hard to call them content creation. Now I call him my creative problem solver because he does a lot more than just create content.
And then I've got a senior app developer, I've got a product manager, and then I've got a data analyst. And we bring all of this information together because we capture so much freaking information on an analog product. You know, a door that has hinges and a door closer that swings.
We have 25 to 40 pieces of data on that door for everyone that we touch.
So we were able to wrap it all into this product that we call OMS Opening Management System. And it manages a door profile for a mechanical swinging door.
It manages a key system that is a mechanical component that tracks the basically numbers to how to cut a key and how a lock works. We pair those two things together so we know what keys work, which openings and then we've triangulated that with a key distribution component. So if we were to hand out or distribute a key to you, we now know what key you have, we now know what doors that you have access to. And so for whatever reason, if you're terminated or you quit, we now have a complete listing for a facility manager to know what doors have been compromised. So if you don't turn your key back in, they know what, what is compromised.
So we have effectively a door inventory and a key system inventory that we run and maintain. We've got over 100,000 openings registered in this software and then we license that out to our end users, to our customer base, so they, their facility managers have access to the same information that we do.
And we also are licensing it out to other locksmiths in our space as well, because it's a platform that they can utilize to help run their business.
[00:54:07] Speaker A: Wow. And so what's your plans for that beyond just using that for yourself? Is that going to be, is that something now you guys are going to launch out to the whole industry or is that you're already headed down that road?
[00:54:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we're headed down that path. So we're currently.
I tried to summarize it as easy as possible. We have been running our own work order management system or self developed ERP or CRM internally for the past 10 years.
It is now with the team that we have significantly smarter people. We've advanced it quite significantly. And so we will be launching the newest version of that on a new platform within the next 30 to 45 days from the time that we're recording this. And then that will also be opened up to the industry because they will now have the ability to kind of phase in, they can manage their openings and key systems and then they will be able to bolt on a dispatch, inventory, sales, customer portal feature. So yeah, so the whole point has always been how can we bring these tools? We have people, we have locksmiths that come to our facility all the time from across the country to tour it and understand how our operations work.
And that is one of the biggest hurdles that they have is they don't have a good software tool to manage their business. And so, you know, that's always been the play. How can we get this tool to more companies so that they can continue to grow and, and you know, have a, have a better way to run.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: That is a, that is a few mountains away from building some, you know, burning CDs in a radio station.
So if someone's listening to this episode and they're loving what you're doing. So first off, how can people in your local area, how do they find you if they want to hire your company? And more importantly, if there's other people in the industry that are like, I want to be on the wait list for this software, like, how do they find you? Where do they go?
[00:56:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So, okay, biggest thing, our company is called lockdoc, lockdoc security. And the website's pretty simple. It's locdoc.net, that's the easiest way to get a hold of our team. You can put an online service request there, put in a sales request, whatever that comes in.
I'm on LinkedIn, on Instagram, all that stuff by my name, Chad Lingefeld. You can find me pretty much anywhere there.
The Opening Management System or oms, it has its own space on our lab website. And you can sign up actually for a free trial without even contacting us just by going to demo.openingmanagement.com trial and you can start up your own instance of it and play around with it right now.
[00:56:55] Speaker A: But, so that was, that was demo.openingmanagementsystem.com forward/demo.openingmanagement.com trial.
[00:57:05] Speaker B: Yep, got it.
[00:57:05] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:57:07] Speaker B: And I've also with a, I guess self promotion with two buddies of mine in the industry, we launched, I don't know now, 18 episodes ago, I guess at least a podcast called Unlocked. And it's a behind the scenes look at running a locksmith business.
We're three businesses about the same size but in three different areas of the globe. So one is in Canada. So we're actually international, but we just kind of share a lot of what we just talked about today, but on an ongoing basis around specifically running locksmith businesses. So we have a very niche audience and a niche focus. But it's, it's, that's been fun as well. So we get to kind of dialogue about that and try to, try to share some of our story there.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: Cool. Well, thanks so much. This has been fantastic. I like to, I like to end every episode with three, three pointed questions. So here we go. If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?
[00:58:19] Speaker B: Man, I would read more earlier.
I, I, that was, that's probably, I, yeah, I missed out on a lot of lessons because I didn't take time to read. I, I learned things the hard way because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't do some self education.
Got it.
[00:58:38] Speaker A: So what belief or mindset shift has had the biggest impact on your success and your happiness.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: Okay, that's a really. Man, that's a deep one.
I said one time, and I regret it now, but I could run the business behind a desk.
As long as I had people that could be my hands and feet.
I could do everything from behind a desk over the phone and be very successful.
That was a very. One, arrogant statement. And two, it had a short lifespan because I can only talk to so many people at a time on a phone.
And it didn't have the.
The value of empowering and trusting people to go do what they needed to do. So that was something that I definitely had in my mind that I could do all of those things myself. And I learned that that was obviously not the case and that I had to get better and stronger at communicating expectations and then getting out of the way and allowing good people to do what they do best.
[00:59:46] Speaker A: You know, one of my mentors had an opportunity to go to Necker island with a bunch of other really successful entrepreneurs, and he had the opportunity to sit at dinner. He was sitting right to the right of Richard Branson.
And so he asked Richard Branson, you know, he's like, oh, my company's doing this.
What do I need to do to get from where I'm at eight figure business to a billionaire? And he said, Richard Branson just looked at him and he said, you got to get rid of all of your bad millionaire habits because that's going to keep you from ever becoming a billionaire.
And so, like you were saying, right, you get this point where you get these habits, and those are some of the times, the things that keep you going. All right, final question. What's the best investment that you've ever made in yourself?
[01:00:30] Speaker B: Ah, best investment that I ever made in myself was.
Maybe a bit sappy here, but is to.
To. To stop and spend more time with my spouse.
My wife is probably one of my biggest encouragers. She is one that has challenged me to continue to do better. And she's one that, when I said, I think I need to make this sacrifice to get to the next level, she's always supported me early in my career. I didn't value that. I took it for granted a lot, and I always ended up putting her lower on the priority list.
And over the past, I would say probably six or seven years, I had the really bad realization that that was happening. And so I've had to change that focus.
So I guess the summary of that statement is make sure you're prioritizing your supporters, you know, whoever that is in your life at a high level, because it's. I think, from what I've read, it can be very lonely if you don't do that. And I don't really aspire to make that happen. So. My relationship with my wife has been something that I've transformed over the years, and it's been probably the biggest and best investment that I've been able to get return on. I love it.
[01:02:09] Speaker A: Chad, thanks so much for being here. This has been a fantastic conversation.
Thank you, man.
