Don’t Let Anyone Look Down on You Because You’re Young
Don’t Let Anyone Look Down on You Because You’re Young
Featuring Kyle Titsworth
With Tim Reed
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Tim Reed: Joining me live from New Orleans is Kyle Titsworth, the partner and general manager of The Fireplace Showcase in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Kyle, thanks for being back on the podcast.
Kyle Titsworth: Thanks for having me, Tim. It’s been a little while since we were here with Daniel, but I’m excited to be back.
TR: It has been a little while, and I’m excited for this conversation—it’s cool to be in the same city and doing this in person. I feel like you’ve been on a whirlwind in our industry for the last couple of years: joining the Northeast HPBA board, taking over partial ownership of your company. There’s a lot that you’ve been doing.
KT: It’s felt busy, but all of it’s been pretty rewarding. I’ve enjoyed taking on some more responsibility, especially with Northeast HPBA. I’m serving as the secretary now, which was a quick transition from my first year as just a board member. It’s been a whirlwind with some of the legislation and stuff that we have going on over in New England.
TR: So you were last on the podcast about three years ago.
KT: At least three. I’ve moved since then.
TR: That’s right. We were talking about succession planning and taking over a legacy business—that was the position you were in. Now you’re past that; you’ve been in the ownership seat for a while. Let’s start with that. Can you talk about the journey of ownership, coming into the business, working in it, becoming an owner, and now being a few years into it?
KT: I guess there’s no one word that describes all of it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s different from the role of a manager in that you see the financials—you see how daily choices, daily interactions, suppliers, and vendors affect the bottom line of the company. Being more involved with our workforce has been one of the biggest changes. My dad is still heavily involved in the company but has taken a step back from the day-to-day operations, which I’ve been overseeing. Having more of a pulse on what goes on every day has been interesting, and so has seeing how that affects the bottom line at the end of the year.
TR: It’s a huge change. And Kyle, you’re young. I still feel like you’re 22.
KT: I’m 31.
TR: So you’re still pretty young, and you’re in an ownership seat. Tell me your journey of learning to lead people over the last few years.
KT: Leadership as a young guy is a challenge—especially in an industry that’s pretty full of people toward the end of their careers, and in a company that has been built on people my dad hired. The great people my dad hired have been there for 17, 22, 25 years. My controller—the third leg of our bureaucracy—has pretty much seen me in diapers. He’s been around for a long time. To date, I am, I think, the second- or third-youngest person in the company. Even with a couple of younger installers we hired and a new service technician, I’m still toward the bottom of that totem pole on age.
So I feel that I really have to lead by example. That’s what my dad always brought to the table. He said, “Watch me, and do it this way.” But I think it’s important for me to lead by example because there may be some doubt in my capabilities. If I can show that I’m a knowledgeable and exemplary force in the business, I think I gain some respect in that regard. Knowledge is how I gain the respect of people, even though I’ve been doing this for eight years and there are other people around who have been doing it a lot longer.
TR: As you were saying that, it reminded me of what the apostle Paul said to his young protégé, Timothy: “Do not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example in faith, in love, and in purity.” I think that really does carry through. You don’t have to be ashamed if you’re a young leader. Don’t let people look down on you because of that—set the example, and people will follow, regardless of your age.
KT: We actually talked about this last night: the discipline of following that clearance as your example—down to the eighth of an inch. Get it nailed down. And that’s been something I’ve been thinking about even just today: holding people accountable to what you know is right, and training them so that they have the knowledge to act on the company’s behalf and my own. That’s been something I’ve been focusing on, and I think it’s really important as I go forward, especially over the next couple of years. I have some big life changes coming up—getting married, and in a couple of years, theoretically, starting a family—and work can’t be the 80-hours-a-week that it sometimes is right now. I have to delegate well, and that leadership is going to be important over the next year or two of change and growth for the company.
TR: I hear that for sure. Speaking of our conversation last night—we’re staying in the same place while we’re down here, which has been awesome for getting to hang out so much—we were talking about how you’re in the process of forming your company’s core values. I know that’s still a work in progress, but why is the formation of core values so important to the way you’re going to be leading going forward?
KT: Core values allow us to lead to a standard. Without those core values—whether they’re stated, or whether they’re the belief of the owner or just the culture of how the company acts—things can slip. If we don’t have something to strive towards (and I like how you put it, an action to strive towards), then I feel that processes and standards can slip, and we just don’t want that to happen. Especially as you’re training new people or growing the business or changing roles, we can continually say that this new process, this thing that maybe seems like extra work, is a way to meet our core values. Without those, I believe a business can become wishy-washy.
TR: A hundred percent. I was talking about this with Matt Bradley pretty recently: in our company, the core values really define our behavior. Without them—I mean, it’s already easy enough for myself to go off the rails—but having it documented, “this is how we behave,” does so much to empower people to do the right thing. When it’s very clear “this is what we do,” you don’t have the shiny-object syndrome; if it doesn’t align with the core values, we’re not going to go chasing that.
Now, the whole time I’ve known you, Kyle, I’ve seen that you’re someone who’s always pursuing growth and getting better and learning. What are some resources you’re pushing into right now when it comes to leadership and development?
KT: That’s a great question. In terms of leadership and development, I’ve been listening to some podcasts, primarily. I spend a lot of time on the road estimating for the company, and I find that the time in the car is a good time to listen to other people’s opinions. Profitable Tradie has been one that I particularly like. It’s a couple of guys from New Zealand who talk about building a trades business with systems and processes in the operation, so the manager’s and the owner’s time can be spent on growing the business rather than on little course corrections throughout the day, which really should only be happening on a larger, longer scale.
TR: That’s awesome. I think it’s so important to remember that if you’re the owner of a company, you’re the lid on growth. It’s you. In the same way that we want to hire the right people, we’ve got to ask the question, “Hey, if we were going to hire for the position I’m in, would I hire myself?” And if the answer is no, we should probably keep trying to get better and better.
I was actually thinking about that recently. I was in Nashville a couple of weeks ago for a conference that was really good—I went with a friend of mine from Alaska—and it was time to get out of the day-to-day of the business and think on some big-picture things, like messaging and marketing. As I was there talking with him, I was reminded how important it is for business owners and leaders to surround themselves with other owners and leaders that aren’t like them, so that we can sharpen each other and learn and grow. A lot of people suffer from this bunker mentality: “I’ve got my nose to the grindstone; I can’t get out of it; I’ve just got to keep pressing forward with what I have.” And I think we really hit some mines in the minefield when we don’t have other people around us who are shaping us. That could be in person, or books, or podcasts—but we need it.
KT: Absolutely. If you’re stuck in your own cyclone of how you’re thinking, you’re inevitably not growing. You get caught up in your own feedback loops, whether they’re positive or negative. It’s hard to break that, especially when you get out of a season and say, “Oh man, we didn’t do that right; we could have done that differently.”
I think the Expo provides some of that, in that there are a lot of people here we can talk to and share experiences with. Even on the plane ride down, I happened to sit next to somebody in our industry, and we spent two and a half hours talking—stories, tips, season-ending insights. I got off the plane and wrote a couple of things down. It’s not a conversation I would have had either (a) during the season, with anybody, just from the time constraint, or (b) with people on my own team, because we’re looking at the same thing.
TR: You’re trying to read the label from the inside of the bottle, in the language of Donald Miller, right? It doesn’t work. You can’t do it. You need some help from people who aren’t in the bottle to be able to read what’s on the label.
And I’ve been thinking about that a lot—the idea that we need time, and physical space away from the day-to-day of the business, periodically, to reprioritize and think about problems from a different perspective. We’re here in New Orleans together at the same time, but these few days outside of the business really do give clarity. When it comes to things like core values—or if you’re thinking about your company’s marketing or branding or messaging, or your website or your sales process—it’s very, very hard to create that out of thin air when you’re in the grind. It’s not impossible, but it’s very hard. But if you can take maybe two days every quarter outside of the business, which is a sacrifice, but most people can sacrifice two days a quarter, and that time and clarity away really can provide an opportunity to build something special.
KT: I think a lot of us see it on a smaller scale, too—the week to week. I personally keep a daily journal of what I have to do: the tasks I have, customers I have to get back to, projects I’m working on. It’s just a to-do list. But at the end of the week, on Sunday, I go back and look through the previous six days and say, “Okay, here’s a reorganization that I’m going to come back to on Monday.” That takes 40 minutes outside of work, and without that time, I’d be a total mess in the coming week. And if you don’t do that on a quarterly or yearly basis, you’re asking for it.
Do not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example in faith, in love, and in purity.
TR: I love that so much. Okay, one thing I want to ask you about—I want to talk about sales. We’ve talked a lot about sales over the years. As you know, I’m a huge advocate of having a formal sales process. I feel like if there’s one thing every company should adopt, it’s a sales process—if you’re not using one, I promise your sales will grow by 30% next year if you start. How do you find ways to keep investing in developing the craft of your salespeople?
KT: One thing that we’ve done, just starting in the last year, is implementing a weekly sales meeting. On Wednesday mornings, we ask the sales team to come in half an hour early, and we have an up-to-an-hour-long meeting. That could be anything from internal discussion about processes and procedures to the airing of grievances (I stole that one from you).
TR: I stole that one from Frank Costanza.* [Both laugh.]
KT: Or sometimes we have outside reps come in, or video call in, and give us their spiel on new products to keep us up to date. I think it’s also important—and this is something we haven’t done exceptionally well—to review the metrics that we are accumulating throughout the year. What are our close rates? What are our site-evaluation rates, based on the number of door swings that we have, or website leads? I think we need to do a better job looking at those, and separating time for individual salespeople to have feedback with the sales manager and the management of the company, and to spend that time organizing their week ahead—or maybe, at some point, a month ahead.
It’s been something I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of months. We’ve started to document where our customers come from. We tried to start really at the beginning: How does the company market? Does that lead to people walking in the door? Does it lead to them calling on the phone, or visiting our website? Where are we getting leads from? How are those leads then followed up on? And the repetition at which they’re followed up on is, I think, important too.
TR: I want to add this really quick, since you talked about tracking metrics: I believe in a weekly sales report. On a weekly basis, have everyone on the sales team—preferably on the last day of the week—send in a quick report, and part of that report is for them to report on their numbers. As an example, it could be, “Hey Kyle, here’s my report for the week. I wrote up 15 estimates. I closed three sales. I booked two in-home visits. Right now, my backlog of sold work that hasn’t been installed yet is $100,000. My month-to-date invoiced sales are $50,000, and I’ve got another $35,000 remaining in the schedule for the month, so I should finish the month at $85,000.” I’m making these numbers up off the top of my head—but when a salesperson has to look at their numbers every week, I’ve found that it transforms the mindset of a salesperson. I think what you’re doing with those metrics is an amazing way to step into that, because it really does change behavior when salespeople have to find their own numbers and send them to somebody else.
KT: Right. We have been looking at having basically a one-page flyer that you could tear off and say, “Okay, this is the information that I’m turning in.” A lot of the metrics on the dollar side that you were speaking of are ingrained into our CRM, but those can be a little confusing to get to, or protected under the admin side, which not everyone has access to. One thing I don’t want to have happen is for that to be flipped back on myself, right? To go into the admin account, look at the numbers, and say, “Hey, here’s your report—what do you think about it?” I don’t think it has the same effect as writing out your own numbers.
TR: I definitely think the report has to be created by the salespeople. When a report is created by the manager for the salespeople, it doesn’t have the same effect, because it’s “my boss telling me about this.” But when you have to go find these metrics and give them, there is a built-in accountability that works really, really well. I think it’s the bedrock of building something.
So, one more thing I want to get your take on when it comes to sales. I think our industry, in a lot of ways, has historically made things difficult for our customers, to say the least. I can think about so many situations of secret shopping—and even mistakes I’ve made in the past—when customers come in looking for a product, and they get sent home to take measurements: “Go home and fill out this one-page form that we have.” Now, if you’re listening to this and you do that, I’m sorry—you have to stop doing that right now. But I’m using that as an example of ways we make life hard for our customers. As you look at our industry right now, what are some ways you’re thinking about where we should not make it hard like this for our customers?
KT: Great question. The first thing that comes to mind is jargon. And it’s not only on our side, actually. We have, you know, “zero-clearance fireplaces” or “zero-clearance pipe”—and we all know that nothing is zero clearance. Or we have a customer come in and say, “I want a gas log insert.” It’s like, “Okay—let’s help you unpack that.”
One thing that I think my team does really well is identifying what the customer is actually looking for before they jump into a product. We’re not sitting down at the table and asking questions (I know you’re an advocate of sitting down and asking the questions, but we’re a little more informal). A customer generally comes in and asks for a fuel type—they might say “gas log insert” and throw “fireplace” in there somewhere too—and our questions tend to be: “Do you have an existing masonry fireplace?” The customer might say yes. “Okay, you have a brick chimney that goes up above?” It’s a little extra question—but those little extra questions make a difference.
Before we really adopted that, I came back from a number of sales visits where I walk in and say, “Okay, I’m here to take a look at your masonry fireplace—can you point me in the right direction?” And they’re like, “I don’t have a chimney.” “Well, the salesperson told me you did.” Nobody looks great in that instance. The customer came down, and they had a sales experience that they just realized was not for what they’re looking for; I come in not looking like I’m prepared; the customer loses faith in your business.
On the website side, we’ve used some of your programs and just tried to demystify the terminology of the fireplace industry. We’ve also done that in our showroom, where we have sections—pellet inserts in one, gas inserts in another, wood inserts in a third. And then on the fireplace side, we have a new-construction display—a hexagon, almost a circle, in the middle of the showroom—but then we have a remodel wall.
TR: I love this.
KT: Each of the fireplaces on the remodel wall is fairly similar—they’re all from the same manufacturer—but they can be selected. If you go to that remodel wall, you say, “Okay, you have an existing wood fireplace, or an old wood or gas fireplace that was built between the ’70s and ’90s. We can replace that with one of these three options—small, medium, or large. We’ve got three interiors, a couple of sets of logs, and some different facing options. Here are examples of different stone mantels. We can do all these parts. You’re going to end this project with a little bit of touch-up paint.”
TR: That clarity is so powerful. I think this is one thing that so many companies in our industry miss when it comes to zero-clearance fireplaces, and I think manufacturers are totally blind to it. There are two categories of zero-clearance fireplaces: There’s new construction and remodel ZCs, and then there’s fireplace replacement ZCs. What you did is so brilliant—because yeah, there’s a billion ZCs out there, but if you have an existing home with an existing zero-clearance fireplace that you’re going to replace—here’s the wall, and we have three options. When I talk about stuff like that, the pushback is always, “But don’t they want to see more than that?”
KT: More than that isn’t an option—unless you want to get into major structural remodeling, and that generally not only blows the budget for the customer, it creates undue confusion.
TR: It extends the timeline.
KT: Yeah—it extends the timeline, it introduces extra trades. And trades is the big thing. We’re in Massachusetts where we can’t do our own gas lines or electrical work, so we have trades we work with very closely. We say, “Hey, we can do the removal of this fireplace. We’ll take down your existing mantel, the stone, and the hearth. We’ll take the fireplace out. We’ll work with someone else if you’d like, but our preferred and knowledgeable electrician and plumber are going to come in, and they’re going to redo the utilities to exactly how we want them—and they know how we want them. Then, we’re going to come back with the fireplace, get an inspection, put the mantel and marble back, and we’re done.” It keeps it more or less in-house. Whereas if they want to see more options—fine, but that’s a remodel project at that point. That’s structural construction.
TR: To me, it’s such a lesson in less is more—that if you can define thoughtful options and parameters for customers, 90% of them will stay within those guardrails. VP Burger told me this years ago: “Customers need a requisite variety—not so many options that they get overwhelmed. You give them ten fireplaces to choose from? Good luck. They need just enough to be able to have some choices, and no more than that.” It seems like that’s what you’re doing with that wall, and I think it’s a lesson for every part of the showroom, every part of the sales process.
KT: It’s something that we’ve done really well on that wall—and done less work on other parts of the room. Even on our gas-insert wall, we have a good, better, best, luxury, and modern—five out of five. The modern happens to be in a slightly different part of the showroom, on a slightly different wall; modern is kind of its own category.
TR: I used to run with good, better, best, modern. I think that’s a really solid gas-insert lineup.
KT: Our existing four spots on the main wall lent themselves to good, better, best, luxury. We pin a certain manufacturer’s luxury product—it’s got all these designer options, and if you want to go that way, you can spend a little bit more money. And the rest of these do everything as well. Wood stoves, in general, I think we do a pretty poor job of—the good, better, best. It’s challenging—I’m thinking of particular wood stoves—it’s challenging to limit that showroom space.
TR: Well, there are so many ways to categorize it. On the gas side, I think good, better, best is so helpful. On the wood side, it can work, for sure, but you can also break it down in other ways: steel, cast iron, soapstone.
KT: We do that.
TR: That’s such a good way, because what you’re trying to do is take something that has a lot of disparate things and unify it. What’s the common denominator between all of it? That’s what I need to talk about with the customer. Good, better, best is amazing. If you only have two options—Kenneth Walker has talked about this on the podcast—do basic and premium, or basic and deluxe, something like that. Again, if it comes to wood-burning product: steel, cast iron, soapstone, catalytic—I often like to have catalytic as a different category. But this goes back to making it easy. It’s our job to take these complex things and put them into buckets.
KT: I think any industry probably does this, but we as fireplace guys get so caught up in the brand, and the message we’re being fed from our manufacturers, and why this manufacturer is better—when the reality is that nobody cares. They want to know that this thing is going to heat their house, it’s going to be safe, and it’s going to do what they expected, regardless of the fuel type. You might see some loyalty in the Northeast to Vermont Castings, for example, but people don’t generally care that they’re buying a certain brand. They want something that’s locally sold and properly installed.
Core values allow us to lead to a standard.
TR: What I hear you saying is not that everything is a commodity and none of the features matter. What you are saying is that it’s the retailer who shapes the brand—the manufacturer should be coming along to play a part in the symphony of your brand. And I think this is really, really important: I don’t think that a lot of dealers have thought enough about how their products are positioned together to solve unique problems. Instead, they just take on everything, and they’re stuck with too many product lines that they don’t know well enough. Customers are overwhelmed; salespeople are overwhelmed. Instead, say: “Okay, what does this manufacturer do best? We’re going to bring in these limited products from them to solve this specific problem, and we’re going to bring in somebody else to solve a different problem.” What happens is, now you can create a brand that says: “At The Fireplace Showcase, we have a solution for all of these different problems.” And it’s not based on the messaging of any one given manufacturer; it’s based on you as the brand.
KT: Right—us being able to solve the problem with the expertise that we have: listening to the customer and saying, “Okay, we’ve identified what you’re trying to get from this product,” as opposed to what the brand tells us the customer is going to end up with.
TR: Speaking of manufacturers, there are a lot of them in our industry that make amazing products, and a lot of them really care about their dealers. What would you say is one thing that manufacturers need to realize about the market right now that they currently don’t?
KT: Interesting question. The first thing I thought of—and this is probably something manufacturers realize—is that the change in energy prices over the next couple of months is going to be significant. I think there’s a real opportunity, especially for the solid-fuel manufacturers, to get ahead of next season in promoting lower heating costs. We had a cold winter on the East Coast—it was a little warmer on the West Coast—but promoting lower heating costs and being ahead of high oil prices and high gas prices coming into next year.
TR: Here’s a really quick note on solid fuels: I’m on the West Coast in a very heavy gas market. Yet earlier this year, we did a data study of over 29,000 estimates that have been created through our WhyFire software, and we sent it out to some folks in the industry and our WhyFire partners, just to share some trends of what we’re seeing. I was shocked that, overwhelmingly, wood was the biggest product in demand from customers over the internet. Now, I’m not saying it’s what was sold—but as far as customer inquiries of what they were interested in, wood overwhelmed those 29,000 estimates and leads. To me, that really says something—because wood, for most companies, is way down the list. There’s something important there. This is something a lot of consumers want, according to the data, but it’s not what we’re selling. We should be paying attention to that.
KT: Yeah—and we’re included in that. We did a review of last year’s total sales, and wood was somewhere around the 25% mark of our total installs, similar to pellet, and then gas was a little stronger than half. But I think wood has two mechanisms to a sale. There’s the customer that just wants to burn wood safely—they’ve been told, maybe by a chimney sweep, that their chimney needs to be lined, or their flues need to be taken out, and it’s not safe to burn in their fireplace. And burning wood is something they enjoy. So they’re looking at a wood product as a way to bring safety back to their home and know that they can leave a fire going when they go to bed with their family. That’s kind of the romantic customer that enjoys burning wood—but probably has gas heat.
TR: Right—probably is in that gas market.
KT: And then there’s another customer that really relies on it for heating.
TR: That lifestyle. We were talking to Dan yesterday, and he was saying he’s splitting four cords.
KT: Yeah—he’s ready for it. But I think there are two different customers there. And I’m not shocked to hear that.
TR: I was shocked when I saw it.
KT: It doesn’t align with my market, but looking at the country as a whole, and especially the more rural areas, it surprises me less.
TR: Yeah, and what was crazy about the study is that there were some rural areas in it, but most of it was relatively heavy population centers.
KT: Now I’m floored.
TR: Regardless, to me it’s really interesting that there’s a lot of demand for solid fuel. And sorry—I cut you off on manufacturers. What’s something else manufacturers need to realize in today’s market that maybe a lot of them don’t?
KT: I still find a lot of manufacturers’ websites and literature and sales POP to be confusing, and not focused. You would think that BTUs per hour is the most important metric of anything, right? I don’t know that a lot of people can explain the BTU. One of the other things we see a lot is, “Well, my stove is bigger than that in size.” Cool—but they burn a little differently now, and we have to educate the customer on how wood burning, or gas burning, or pellet burning has changed over the years.
TR: The terminology makes sense with what you were saying, right? Manufacturers are the first stop on a lot of consumers’ journeys. And—it’s true for retail companies as well—if your website has the words “zero-clearance fireplace” on it, I’m sorry, you’ve missed the boat. You’re speaking French and your customers are speaking English.
KT: On our website, we have “fireplace,” “insert,” and “stove”—and I don’t even like that. The amount of people that come in and say, “I’m here to buy a fireplace,” when they’re looking at inserts—or vice versa—is staggering. I think we’re confusing people unnecessarily.
TR: A hundred percent. I think it has to go back to situations. “Insert,” “zero clearance,” “B-vent”—that’s our language. It’s not our customer’s language; they have no idea what that means. But they do know their situation. If a website is organized around that, then a customer can start to find something that solves their problem.
KT: I’m totally with you on the terminology. I think that is the first place to start for manufacturers.
TR: Kyle, I’m curious, just as we round out: what’s the next area of growth you’re pushing into—whether personally or in your business?
KT: I can do both. In the business, we are exploring the sauna. We feel that it’s something we can participate in—we’re wood stove installers.
TR: A complementary skill set.
KT: In the summers, a lot of people do spas or some other related, offset-season industry; we focus on playgrounds. Those playgrounds are fairly good-sized, but we feel that we could build barrel saunas or log saunas in a very similar manner to how we do our swing sets. So we have, like you said, a complementary skill set that will allow us to do that successfully. We’ve looked at a couple of manufacturers, and we’re pretty set on one. We haven’t jumped in yet, but it’s something we’ve been exploring and hope to jump into this off-season.
And then personally—it also relates to business a little bit—trying to spend more intentional time away from work. As I get into my 30s, I’m finding that I need to be very intentional about putting my phone down, getting off my email, spending time with my fiancée, and getting to see my family in a capacity that isn’t work. I’ve got a house—I’m lucky to have a house—and I love doing projects around the yard, but I have to very intentionally set the time aside to do those things. That’s been, truthfully, really hard for me. I think I’m doing a little bit better, especially as we come into this off-season. I have been able to put my phone down and be disconnected for four hours at a time—which, three years ago, as I jumped into this new leadership role, with the business feeling all-consuming, I couldn’t do. I think I’m doing a better job of that.
TR: I love that, man. That’s so good. Distraction is the enemy and the siren song of our day, so finding ways to be present, away from noise and distraction—I think that is a superpower. Kyle, it’s been such a good conversation, man. Thanks for being on the podcast today.
KT: Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it.
