Billy Claunch

I think eight or nine years in James was like, we need to hire some more people. And I was like, okay, so we hire one or two people. And I’m going crazy trying to manage them. Cause I don’t know what in the world they’re doing. You know, I hear them on the phone. I’m like, good grief. You can’t say that. Like, how do you — I was just so stressed out not knowing what they’re doing, but James is always like, nah, man, we can grow this. We can do better. There’s a bigger market. And I knew that intuitively. I just didn’t have the translation to be able to know how to manage and grow that. But after we implemented Salesforce and got comfortable with using it as the tool, I was more the one pushing growth and hiring people. I was like, no, no, no, we can run this. We can break up the process as needed. I can see what’s needed. Let’s go. We can grow this.

Sam Donaghey

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life.

In today’s episode, we’re continuing our conversation with two incredible guests whose businesses have actually partnered for over 10 years together. Billy Claunch is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Brindley Mountain Fire Apparatus, the largest buyer and seller of used fire trucks in the Western hemisphere. And John Burdett is the founder of Fast Slow Motion, a company that has helped nearly 1,000 businesses grow with scalable systems built on the Salesforce and HubSpot CRM platforms. Let’s dive back into how Billy and his best friend James Wessel grew and scaled Brindley Mountain and achieved the success that business enjoys today.

John Burdett

Your CRM can be a platform to run your entire business and get rid of all the other software platforms that you’re using, so that all your data is in one place. You then have consistent data. You don’t have to have integrations going on, which creates a huge information advantage that you’re able to leverage. And in today’s world with AI — like you guys are using Einstein — it’s going to create even more opportunities because you have really good, meaningful, enriched data. That’s going to allow you to have a huge advantage over your competition. So that data element, I think a lot of times people overlook the value of that.

Everybody wants to use AI these days and that’s kind of the hot topic, but most businesses don’t have their data house in order. And that’s one advantage that Brindley has that’s huge. Not only are all the processes in one place and you’ve leveraged a system as a true platform to scale your business, you have all your data there as well.

And then you brought up another good point — because you and I have had these conversations along the way — is expense versus investment. Because you’re right, Salesforce is our largest expense outside of labor as well. We use Salesforce to run our whole business, but the total cost of ownership is way cheaper than anything else we could do. If we tried to do what we’re doing and hodgepodge a bunch of systems together, it would probably be 10x the cost. So we see it the same way — as an investment. But as a business leader and a business owner, especially one that may not be as familiar with technology, you really kind of have to overcome that hurdle in your mindset. It is truly an investment. Yeah, I’m spending a lot of money, but I’m getting a return on that investment. And then we also have a phrase that we like to call return on luck, or return on opportunity — because opportunities present themselves that you could have never predicted, and you get to take advantage of them because you planted the right seed, you put the right processes in place, and your data’s in order. I’d love to share a little bit — since you and I have had these conversations about overcoming that mental hurdle of expense versus investment — because you guys do spend a lot of money and it’s a significant investment to do what you need to do, but obviously it’s paid off with a lot of return over the years.

Billy Claunch

This is the only business I’m involved with full-time as an operator. So I don’t have a context to speak into other businesses. You have so much expense in a business that’s not quantified. Most of it probably is labor — that’s the easiest one to try to quantify. And I think businesses do that through a variety of means: productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. There are different tools depending on your industry to try to figure out what return you’re getting on that hour of a person you’re expecting to be thinking about making your business profitable, or executing a particular process that supports making your business possible. And that’s such an uncontrollable, and it’s so hard to quantify.

The hesitation it seems like that I see is fairly elementary, because it’s, oh, now I see a number on a page and before I didn’t see a number on a page. Well, I don’t want to say childish, but it’s borderline childish. There’s cost in there. Like your people are doing something. And if you don’t have a way to see what your people are doing, and then more importantly, give them a better tool to do it better, to make it easier for them, or to make a change structurally that allows them to do it more efficiently — that’s your biggest tool to manage.

Inspiration is one thing, but inspiration fades. In James Clear’s book, he says you fall to the level of your systems. So you’re going to fall — I’m going to fall — to whatever my default activity is day in, day out, in the routine of a work life. That foundation’s got to be built where A) you can see what’s going on with it, and B) you can affect some change with it. So if you don’t have that, I don’t even know how you operate the business.

I think I’ve told you this story. Early on in our sales and marketing division, it was basically three people for the first ten years. I think eight or nine years in, James was like, we need to hire some more people. And I was like, okay, so we hire one or two people. And I’m going crazy trying to manage them because I don’t know what in the world they’re doing. I hear them on the phone and I’m like, good grief, you can’t say that. I was just so stressed out not knowing what they’re doing. But James is always like, nah, man, we can grow this. We can do better. There’s a bigger market. And I knew that intuitively. I just didn’t have the translation to be able to know how to manage and grow that. But after we implemented Salesforce and got comfortable with using it as the tool, I was more the one pushing growth and hiring people. I was like, no, no, no, we can run this. We can break up the process as needed. I can see what’s needed. Let’s go. We can grow this.

John Burdett

So much of what you talked about is really that mindset change. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders struggle with letting go, having the humility to realize — hey, if this business is going to rely on my heroics to get to where we’re going, it’s not going to scale. And I really commend you and James for having that humility, like, okay, there’s a better way. I’m not sure exactly what that journey is or how I’m going to get there, but I know there’s a better way. Because so much of these expenses and the cost and the effort and all these things are emotional responses. And a lot of times we just rely on ignorance and say, I’d rather not know what the real cost of something is versus actually knowing. But once you get a little taste of the Kool-Aid and you start drinking a little bit more, you can’t imagine another way of running your business — without that visibility you guys have today, to know exactly how much stuff costs, to know exactly how to onboard a new employee, to exactly how to replicate these processes. And then you have the freedom to think about new opportunities, new strategies, go on vacation — all those kinds of things you’ve been able to benefit from.

Billy Claunch

Yeah, that’s a great point, John. I’ll give one quick anecdote related to that. As far as assessing new opportunities — we used to average 27 days to close the month on financials, and that bell curve was large, mostly on the back side. There would be months where we’re closing 45 and 60 days out because we’d have complications in this or that or whatever. Reviewing the financials at that point — I didn’t even read them. I’m like, man, that’s so far gone, it has nothing to do with what I’m doing today. Useless. But once we got rolling with Salesforce, we were closing in hours, not days. Literally closing in 48 hours, 72 hours, 96 hours.

By this point, we’ve been able to make a number of acquisitions. We would not have done it without Salesforce. Our employment now is about 210 to 220 people all in, and we close usually by the 10th or the 12th of the month. We could push it and close quicker, but there’s no reason to. It’s just night and day — from closing 45 to 60 days out with 40 employees and it being useless information, to closing in hours. Just night and day for us.

John Burdett

I use this analogy all the time — run your business looking through the windshield instead of the rear view mirror. So many people are looking at those dated financials and finding out, like you said, 60 days after the fact. It’s way too late to be proactive or intentional at that point, especially in a fast-growing business like yours and ours. 60 days is an eternity. I need to know what to do proactively, not reactively. Building these systems and processes and ingraining them in your culture allows you to do that.

Billy Claunch

I would make one more point to that. Salesforce’s dashboards and reports — one of our big gaps I mentioned in the beginning was management reporting. That’s why we built all those Excel sheets. The management reporting we get now, which is 100% automated, gives us insight into the financials. I can usually call net income within 90% on the day the month closes.

John Burdett

And obviously you’re very good at your video game now, right? You’re able to master it, which is always another level.

Well, you know, our mission at Fast Slow Motion is to be a blessing to businesses and help them grow — because we believe life is holistic and you can’t compartmentalize it. We think work’s a good thing and work should be fun, but you should also not miss out on the other important things in life, like your family, your relationships, and all the people that you have.

Your wise and better-looking business partner James once told us — and it sounds dramatic, but the work that was done by Fast Slow Motion to build solutions on our CRM platform has made me a better husband and father. I’m able to see things that I need to see as an executive for the business in far less time than I’ve ever been able to see them before. I’m able to work fewer hours and be home and present with my wife and kids more. I know that relates to you as well because we’re friends and we’ve gotten to know each other. Share a little bit about how putting these systems and processes in place — having your business set up so you can run it and not miss out — because you have a large family at all different stages of life. Maybe share with some other business leaders who are missing out on the baseball games, missing out on dinner with their wives or whatever, how this has impacted your life as well.

Billy Claunch

James, as you mentioned, has six children. I’ve got five. Both very busy with families. But we own a very old school, boring industrial business that involves assets that burn diesel fuel. You just have to be around those assets to know what’s happening. Factories are factories. You can build a tech company and scale this or that, but somebody still has to literally put your shoes together and get them to a store or get them to your door. And if your house catches fire, there is a physical truck that has to show up there and has to be working. Fire trucks have about 2,500 parts in them and one of them is always breaking, it seems like. So our job is to support the people who are making sure those things will run when you dial 911.

So that’s a hard business as an owner or a manager — when you have the ultimate responsibility for that — to extricate yourself from it physically, to be able to spend that time with family and children. But consistent with the video game analogy, once you guys built us a platform where we could see everything we needed to see through digital means, we were untethered. That also set us up unbelievably well for COVID. COVID for us was just a flip of a switch. I think we kind of forget — because every company has remote now and some people are forced back to the office and some aren’t — but before COVID, remote was still kind of a weird thing. Not everybody was pushing for that. But for us, it was nothing. We just flipped the switch and said, okay, if you don’t have hands on a fire truck, we’ll see you in the morning at the 10 a.m. meeting. Simple as that. We were ready for COVID — thanks to Salesforce, thanks to John, thanks to Fast Slow Motion. It was not an issue for us operationally outside of the challenges that naturally affected all businesses. From a remote standpoint and a data access standpoint, there was never a need for us to be physically at the office because we were untethered. So if you needed to do something right before the baseball game, knock it out in the parking lot in the car, head into the baseball game. We’re set.

John Burdett

Yeah, that freedom and flexibility — you just can’t put a price tag on that. Being around your family, being at the ballpark, finishing something up real quick and then being present during the baseball game to watch your son or daughter play is priceless.

Billy Claunch

Some pushback I’ve encountered — I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a number of business owners that you’ve sent my way over the years as a referral point for Salesforce or for Fast Slow Motion, which I always enjoy doing. And that’s a point I’ve always tried to make. If you’re a business owner that has a business depending on physical assets — it’s a lumber company, it’s an oil refinery, it’s a logistics company, you’re moving freight, it’s a warehouse — there are physical things that you have to see to be able to manage that business effectively. You can still run it remotely. Everything can be run remotely. It’s just a question of how far you want to go with the observation of it. Particularly in today’s world with the Internet of Things, you can get access to all types of equipment. You can go pretty deep with that. But I still think there’s opportunity for the small industrial business who’s still doing somewhat pen and paper, who’s still laying eyes each day on the yard or on this or that — you don’t have to become Amazon. There’s still opportunity for you to just level up a little bit and get above your competition.

John Burdett

One final question for you. You’re the only person I know that has an instance of Salesforce to run their personal life. Share that experience a little bit — kind of what you do — because I think it’s pretty unique and pretty interesting.

Billy Claunch

Salesforce gave me the tool to see my business and see everything about it that I wanted to see. I’ve been wanting that ever since I got into the business. And I’m a big repetitive behavior guy. So when I get a report coming to me from sales, I’d like a similar format from marketing, a similar format from finance. I can see the screen, I understand it, it’s the graph. We have more bar graphs probably than any other client you have. We just do bar graphs. You can see the data. It doesn’t have to look fancy, you just need to see it.

So for me in my personal life, it’s the same thing. Why would I go learn some other system to know that I need to prep this kid for his college application in a year, or that we need to be working on this over at my mom and dad’s house in six months? Like, you just manage the opportunities in your personal life the same way you do in your professional life. See it on the same screen. And then you’re saving time learning how to run processes personally, because you’re getting some benefit from the same system. It makes no sense to me why people wouldn’t do that. I will say my adoption at Brindley is probably a little better than it is at home — I’ve still got some work to do there — but from a system standpoint, I think we’re set.

John Burdett

Well, thank you so much, Billy. Your wisdom and your friendship mean so much to us at Fast Slow Motion, and we’re just blessed to be able to work alongside you and your team. So thanks again for joining us.

Billy Claunch

Well, thank you, John. You guys — Fast Slow Motion, the whole team — have been life changers for us at Brindley. You’re a critical part of what we do and what we are. It’d be impossible to operate the business without you guys. So please don’t go anywhere. We appreciate you and everything you guys do.

Sam Donaghey

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you, Billy, for joining us today and sharing about your journey with Brindley Mountain Fire Apparatus. For our listeners, we hope that hearing Brindley’s story inspires you as you work to grow your own businesses. And I know that the practical insights Billy shared today about how to grow and scale are so valuable for the business owners out there who’d love to replicate that kind of success.

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