The Remodeler Digital Playbook Podcast

Mastering Growth: Insights from Michael Hoy on Leading a Top Remodeling Company

• Rathna Ramakrishnan • Season 1 • Episode 11

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In this episode of the Remodeler Digital Playbook Podcast, Rathna Ramakrishnan interviews Michael Hoy, CEO of Great Day Improvements. Michael shares his journey from a young worker in his father's auto repair shop to leading one of the top remodeling companies in the country. He discusses the importance of maintaining brand identity across multiple acquisitions, creating lifelong customers, and the role of technology in enhancing customer experience. 

Michael also provides insights into marketing strategies, the significance of customer feedback, and offers advice for young remodelers looking to grow their businesses. The conversation concludes with Michael's thoughts on the future of the remodeling industry and the importance of personal connections in business.


📌 KEY MOMENTS:

- 04:46: Maintaining Brand Identity Across Acquisitions
- 13:27: Creating Lifelong Customers
- 22:21: Marketing Strategies in a Changing Landscape
- 31:57: Engaging with Customers Post-Project
- 40:08: Mentorship and Personal Growth

🌟 What You'll Learn:
- ACTIONABLE TIPS to create lifelong customers and how to use feedback. 
- INSIGHTS into the role of technology and customer experience. 

🔨 Essential listening for remodeling contractors seeking to advance their digital marketing strategies.

🎧 Tune in now to transform your approach to digital marketing!

Ready to see real results from fellow General Contractors?

→ Step 1: Join our FREE Digital Dominance Club for Remodeling Contractors

→ Step 2: Follow us on Instagram

→ Step 3: Schedule a 1:1 call with Rathna now!

Let's rock your remodeling journey! 🛠️💰

Rathna Ramakrishnan (00:06.316)
Welcome everybody to the Remodeler Digital Playbook podcast. I am super excited to speak to our special guest today, Michael Hoy, the CEO of Great Day Improvements. Michael, welcome.

Michael Hoy (00:22.595)
Well, thank you for having me. I've been excited to do this with you.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (00:24.995)
Thank you so much. So just a short introduction, Michael has such an amazing background and we're going to hear his story, but he has a passion for home improvement with a commitment to quality. And Michael has led his team in transforming homes across the country.

Great Day Home Improvements is listed as number five in the top remodellers in the country, completing over 70,000 projects annually with over a billion dollars in revenue. Today he'll be sharing his inspiring journey. And what I find most intriguing is how they have maintained the entrepreneurial culture throughout the company and reaching its success today. Where are you at? 292 locations in 2024?

Michael Hoy (01:11.715)
We're 288. We might be at 290 by the end of the year though. So we're pretty close to that number.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (01:17.356)
Congratulations, it's just mind boggling to think about these numbers. So let's start at the very beginning. What got you interested in home improvement? And how did you become the CEO? Because I have a 14 year old and every time I ask him, what do you want to be in life? He says, I'm going to be a CEO. So were you one of those kids that was driven to be a CEO and were you always interested in home improvement?

Michael Hoy (01:20.259)
Thank you.

Michael Hoy (01:44.355)
So I was never driven to be a CEO. That was not my objective in life. I grew up in Baltimore. I still live in the Baltimore area today. My parents were entrepreneurs, both small business owners. My father was an auto repair mechanic and owned gas stations. My mother owned video rental stores. And I worked in my father's shop really from the time I was probably five or six till I was an early teenager. And what I realized

during that is I did not like the smell of oil. I didn't like just being dirty all the time. And I started to recognize at a pretty young age that technology was changing that world. The old school mechanics were not what they used to be. So I had plans to go to college. I actually had a wrestling scholarship to Iowa. Unfortunately, I didn't end up going. I got in pretty bad car accident just prior to leaving.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (02:16.43)
you

Michael Hoy (02:41.109)
and had been working in a lumber yard part-time. And to this day, a lumber yard is still my favorite smell in the world. So if I walk into a Home Depot or Lowe's, that's usually where I go first because I love that smell. So that was how I got into the home improvement and really building space, supplying contractors and homeowners with materials, and just kind of fell in love with the whole sales and marketing part of it over the years.

And then eventually got into direct-to-consumer back in the late 90s and early 2000s with the Pella Corporation and eventually with Renewal by Anderson and have fallen in love over and over again with direct consumer home improvement and the ability to really help people realize these dreams they have for their home. They don't always know where to go and to build trust with them and to find ways to really build a nationally-scaled

platform, is what Great Day has become, that was not our original plan. So it's kind of evolved over time. And as we've seen opportunity, we kind of started to wonder why couldn't it be us that did it first? And we took that challenge on, and here we are today.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (03:52.535)
Well, fascinating. So did you land up going to university eventually or you?

Michael Hoy (03:59.283)
I did not. No, I did not. I stayed in and became a student of life. That's the University of Life. So I learned from a lot of really, really great people. There's still mentors of mine today that I stay in touch with that taught me along the way. And I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (04:03.285)
Amazing.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (04:16.597)
What a fantastic story. know, just building one brand ground up is hard enough where the usual advice in the market is to like niche down so you're able to like, you know, find that ideal client, you're able to serve them. And then you look at a brand like yours where you go and you acquire a roofing company and a gutter and all sorts of different home improvement services. How do you create a vision and a brand identity where I'm sure all of those unique brands

are able to keep their unique identities that they're coming into the play with, but as a giant umbrella of these brands and you as the CEO and visionary, how do you maintain consistency? Every homeowner, remodeling is such a personal business, you're in people's homes for weeks. How do you make sure that all of your brands are represented with your values and principles that you guys live by?

Michael Hoy (05:15.427)
Well, you know, it sounds like it's a really overwhelming task and at times it can feel a little like that, but I don't think it's as complex as people think it is. So when we began to grow outside of the patio enclosures business, we did that primarily because we wanted to diversify the products that we were selling. And we recognize that if we could create an experience for customers,

with one brand and they had a really great experience that introducing another service to them, one, would be natural for us to do. We would have earned the right to do it. And two, if they trusted us and really loved what we had done, if they needed gutters or bath or whatever it may be, we're probably going to be the first person that they call because they trusted us the first time. We earned the trust throughout that process. So.

I don't know of any home improvement company in the country that doesn't want to provide the customer with a great experience. So thankfully we all have that in common. How we get there is not always the same. So as we've evaluated businesses to partner with, we truly believe that the entrepreneur should be leading these organizations. It doesn't mean that there's not places for private equity, institutional investors, or others to be in the space.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (06:15.64)
Right.

Michael Hoy (06:36.439)
We just believe that people that have done the job that understand the cultures of these organizations and understand what people want, not just the customer, but the employees, that you can create some commonality. We all tend to have the same problems. We all tend to have the same challenges and we also all have the same opportunities. So, you your podcast is the digital playbook. You know, we're, we have a playbook and that playbook is not much different from everyone else's.

The difference is we think we execute it better. So when we bring everybody together, our vision for the future is not much different than theirs in terms of how do we take care of our customer? How do we take care of our employees? What may be different is how it's executed. And what we do is we work really hard to build trust with other like-minded entrepreneurs that really care about their people, care about their customer. And if we do that and we build trust with those folks,

To us, it's one and one equals three. So we call it great together. And it's not hard to get people on the same overall vision of where we're going. There's a lot of pride that comes with someone that worked at Champion for 30 years. And they've been around for 70 years. So why would we want to rid ourselves of all that brand equity? And that's how we've approached it. That's not necessarily how everybody else approaches it, but.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (07:48.398)
course.

Michael Hoy (08:01.825)
We believe that these brands are really strong as individual organizations, but they're part of something larger now. And getting everybody on the idea that Great Day is a platform, and we're trying to create the most referable home improvement company that ever existed on a national scale, so we can share opportunity across customers and say, we did a great job on your sunroom, we'd love an opportunity to do your gutters, your bath, your windows.

That has been the vision of the organization. We still feel like we're just getting started. There's still a lot of opportunity out there and we've got a lot of room for improvement. The thing I would say is that I tend to get a lot of credit because I'm the CEO. My partner Ed Weinferner, who's our executive chairman, he really led the acquisition of Patio Enclosures back in 2014. He's been a big part of this vision as well.

Our executive team has been a big part of this vision, but ultimately it's an execution play more than it is a vision play. It's the people every day in our customers homes that are really the ones that are making all this happen and the people in our call center. So I tend to get a lot of credit, probably undeserved, but it's really just the people making all this happen.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (09:21.146)
So you don't disrupt the brand then when you acquire the brand you keep the people, you keep their philosophies, their principles and then you integrate them into the larger umbrella of brands and then you let them do what they're really good at.

Michael Hoy (09:38.657)
Yes, yeah, there are certain things that we do pretty early on. You know, we do have certain financial reporting requirements that need to be consistent. So we work with the brand to, we call it harmonize their data to make sure that we're all working off of the same nomenclature and terminology that our accounting standards are the same, our financial reporting standards are the same. But we don't do that in a way where we're...

you know, invading their offices and sitting at their desks and telling them how to do business, we're really taking the time to seek to understand what they do, how they do it and why they do it that way to determine maybe they have a better practice than we do and maybe we should be looking to change to their method. But if not, we're going to come to a way of doing things and then we work with them over a period of time to conform to whatever that process of practice is based on.

their business process, their practice, their systems, their talent. We don't try to force it, but there are certain things we try to do early on because we think better together is a thing, right? We do have the advantage of taking advantage of our scale and our size.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (10:47.436)
do you determine which contributor or new company to add to your brand umbrella? you want to own the entire home improvement space and go from bathroom remodeling to kitchen remodeling to exterior to siding, windows, roofs? Or are there certain parameters that you look for in a brand when you're looking at acquisition metrics?

Michael Hoy (11:11.181)
Yeah, so I would say that the criteria has changed a bit over the last three or four years as we've gotten to the size that we are. You there's still a lot of geography that we don't cover. So while we're in 48 states today, the continental US, we're not in every part of those states. And in some cases, you know, we may not want to be. So the question is, is, you know, of the 288 locations, approximately half of those

we've opened as greenfield locations or extensions off of another market. They're not all acquisitions, so it's about 50-50. There's opportunity for us to gain growth just by opening new locations of the brands we have in territories where we're underrepresented. And then we're constantly looking at the other products and services in the home improvement space, home services space that customers are asking us for.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (11:42.083)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Hoy (12:05.471)
So while we're in the home, we'll hear the other things we're talking about doing. As you know, back in June, we added Leaf Guard, the number two player in that space. We also added Engler, which is the manufacturing arm of that business. We love the manufacturing and the vertical integration. That gives us an opportunity to get more into roofing, which we haven't been as much into. So there's not really a category that we are.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (12:11.086)
Mm-hmm.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (12:26.808)
Yeah, metal rules.

Michael Hoy (12:34.593)
necessarily shying away from. But we do have windows, sunroom, roofing, siding, gutter. So a lot of the outside of the home, as you can tell, we've spent focus on. And now that we're inside of the bath side, we've got 45 locations now that do bath and one day to three day bathroom model, depending upon what the consumer is asking for. So we're very open to other services and products.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (12:53.197)
Nice.

Michael Hoy (13:03.895)
But we certainly are also really committed to what we're doing today, as we'd like to run more of that through our room manufacturing facilities.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (13:09.134)
Right. So are you building lifelong customers? Do you think you have the magic sauce and that the homeowner comes in, they build a, you know, they do a siding, they do a bathroom remodel. Are you successful in moving that homeowner through all of your different brands? Do you have a strategy?

Michael Hoy (13:27.931)
I love how you put that. So we say internally in our walls, we're trying to create a customer for life. And the only way to do that is to have a great experience with us from the very get-go so that we've earned the right to introduce our other product services and brands that may be representative in the markets that these people live in. You know, we're finding ways to brand Great Day more nationally. That's certainly a big focus for us.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (13:32.994)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Hoy (13:54.401)
with the idea of also introducing brands that consumer may not be accustomed to, which is more the consumer facing part of our business. So the goal is, yes, to have a company that creates a customer for life. And the only way to do that is to become the most referable home improvement company in the country. So ultimately, that's our goal. And to do that, you have to create a great experience for your customers, for your shareholders, for your employees, and everybody's got to win.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (14:21.272)
Right, amazing. So let's pretend I'm a homeowner that has a couple of pain points that I'm trying to solve for myself in my home, and I reach out to your call center, walk me through the experience of what I would go through as a lead to get to the estimate and then have my project launched. What do those, that pathway look like?

Michael Hoy (14:43.127)
Yeah, so today all of our brands and there's 12 total have unique call centers that are unique to their brand. So if you're going to call one of our call centers, certainly someone's going to try to answer that phone immediately. No different if it's you calling or someone that's passing a lead along to us. And we're going to really focus on what does the customer want to have done and where are they located? Are we in a place that we can service them properly?

Rathna Ramakrishnan (15:01.966)
.

Michael Hoy (15:10.423)
Do they actually have a project that is something that we really do? Some people will call in and say, I want my windows fixed. They actually want them replaced. And other people say they want the window replaced and they just mean the glass. we do want to make sure that we're providing the service that they want. And then we're going to find a time that is as quick as possible for us to get out to their home that's convenient for them and every other decision maker that's involved. Not every decision maker is always there. So we're really focused on

trying to create a great experience at the point of setting the confirmed appointment in their home. And then we're gonna try to get out there as early as today if they'll take us. So we wanna get out there while they're thinking about the project they're doing.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (15:53.41)
got it and then you generate the estimate and order the materials in and the project gets started.

Michael Hoy (16:01.859)
Correct. We're going to provide financing that day. We're going to likely sign a contract that day and we're going to be scheduling the measure or whatever is the next step that day. We'll be explaining what is next. We have a what's next brochure in every home within every brand as to what to expect from us. And we're going to do everything we can to communicate with that customer along the way to get their job fulfilled. Every brand has a little different lead time, right? So Leaf Guard, you could sign a contract today. We could be out there as early as tomorrow to do the install.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (16:30.434)
I see.

Michael Hoy (16:32.035)
With custom windows and doors, it's probably going to be closer to three or four weeks. With a sunroom, there's more permitting, more engineering. Could be just a couple of weeks, but could also be a couple of months, depending upon the circumstances. So we're going to focus project by project on what we're capable of and make sure we explain that to the customer during the selling process and the estimating process to ensure they understand what to expect from us.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (16:59.072)
So the sales advisors, or I don't know what you call them, the actual people that go into the homes to generate the estimates and meet the homeowner and understand the project, are they using any specific software to show and tell or enhance the selling process, like when they are in the customer's home or the potential customer's home?

Michael Hoy (17:22.499)
Yeah. So as you can imagine, when you acquire as many businesses as we have, there's lots of different systems. While there's been some commonality amongst them, we haven't gotten down to one CRM yet or one way. But we're getting closer to that. And that is an objective for us, is to have a great day way of presenting in the home by product and by brand.

but is consistent with the Great Day standards and how Great Day operates. We call it the Great Day way. So every one of the brands is using some sort of technology in the home to present not only who we are and what they provide, but also to provide a quote that's good to the dollar that day, allow the customer to get financing, allow them to contract that day, and allow us to get started pretty much immediately. So.

While they're not all the same, there is lot of commonality between them and we're working very hard to get to some consistency there across all the brands.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (18:20.66)
Nice. When you look at your tech stack, is there a certain set of tools that you use to show off like the project timeline to the homeowner so they can see some photos? You know, when the materials are arriving, are there favorite tools that you have? Perhaps like top three, I'm sure you're to run the scale of an organization. You must have so many tools that you're digging into. are there a few that you'd be open to sharing about?

Michael Hoy (18:43.16)
We.

Michael Hoy (18:48.289)
Yeah, I think there's, probably have more tools today than we would want to have just given the number of acquisitions we've brought together. The one thing we are though really proud of is we're building a tool that will be common across the brands in terms of how we present ourselves in the home and how the expectations are explained to the customer. If you've ever ordered a pizza from Domino's, they have the pizza tracker. And we want to replicate that type of experience for the customer.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (18:54.35)
Alright.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (19:12.066)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Hoy (19:18.039)
But we don't want to do it with a tool that all other contractors are using. We think the in-home experience should be really unique to us or anything that the customer sees from us should be unique to us. Whereas some of the items that are on the backside the customer never sees, such as the scheduling tools, the things that they feel but they don't actually visualize, those can be more common, off-the-shelf, industry-specific.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (19:21.09)
Mmm.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (19:25.71)
you

Michael Hoy (19:43.725)
But anything that's customer facing, we really think should be unique to Great Day if we're going to create a unique experience.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (19:49.206)
Amazing. So you basically have a software development team that's building your own platform then that's going to standardize your operations. How exciting. When do you anticipate it to ensure, you know, software is always a progress. So do you anticipate it to have like a formal launch and it's your 1.0 version coming up soon or?

Michael Hoy (19:55.393)
Yes, correct.

Michael Hoy (20:08.451)
We have a launch for a few of our brands that has, it's in test mode. So we've already begun there and we are in the process of consolidating five of our brands down to some common platforms right now that we expect to have done by the end of Q1. So there's a lot of activity on the technology side that we're focused on right now. And it's a high priority to have a tech stack in the future.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (20:33.259)
Incredible, amazing, exciting, right? Technology is the future. So do you use, yes, do you use AI or, you know, virtual reality, any of those methodologies to, yes.

Michael Hoy (20:38.883)
It was very exciting.

Michael Hoy (20:49.121)
We do, we actually developed our own specifically for the sunroom business to give that customer a visual of this is what your addition, your room, your space, your enclosure is going to look like from your backyard, from your kitchen, the ability to stand in that space using virtual reality and AI. So we've done that, but we're also using some of the AI tools that the industry provides such as Ciro and Rilla.

to help our sales teams just get more effective at what they do in the home and allow our sales managers to be better effective in terms of their leadership and coaching. We're using Balto and Ring Central and our call centers to help our folks get better there. So we're constantly testing new technology and new process and new practice in an effort to find out which one is the best for the whole. You the benefit of having 12 brands is there's

probably been 12 unique ways that people have done things throughout those 12 brands. That can be overwhelming, frankly, and it can almost feel like too daunting, but when you have 12 places as a testing ground, it's really an opportunity for us to say, let's test multiple things in multiple places and see what would work the best for the whole. And you get really good collaboration and cooperation then amongst those brands trying to learn what each other is doing.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (21:45.912)
Mm-hmm.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (21:56.268)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Hoy (22:13.421)
to be more effective. So that's part of the, if you want to call it the secret sauce or our culture, we really encourage that type of collaboration amongst the brands.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (22:21.037)
And testing and executing becomes easier when you have different data sets and you can try it out. Amazing. Let's talk marketing. Considering I'm a digital marketer and I work exclusively with remodeling contractors, how do you plan your marketing budget? Do you have certain channels that are tried and tested that you stick to no matter what? Because you've played this game for so many years. How are you adapting to digital marketing and online lead generation today?

Michael Hoy (22:26.903)
Yes. Yes.

Michael Hoy (22:50.359)
Yeah, so I'm going to give you the vague answer, but I will try to make it as detailed as possible. You know, if you go back to prior to COVID, marketing was the most predictable I can ever recall it. The cost per lead or the cost per issued lead, whatever terminology you use, was pretty consistent, blended. Again, channel by channel, the web at one point was almost a free lead where today, in some cases, it's almost your most expensive source, depending upon

Rathna Ramakrishnan (22:56.065)
Okay.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (23:17.314)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michael Hoy (23:19.597)
how it is from it and what your mix is. So, you we were all pretty consistent pre-COVID. During COVID, we all got hyper efficient. It didn't matter what your lead source was, it got more efficient. You just got more for what you spent. And now we're in an environment where we all wanted to know what new normal was and what new normal is, is not what it was prior to COVID. And I think everyone's trying to understand what does that really mean and what has to change.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (23:33.901)
Right.

Michael Hoy (23:48.707)
In my view, the biggest thing that's changed is really digital and digital marketing has become the primary point where most people go and start their journey, whether they saw you in the web, they saw you in the paper, a billboard, the radio, the TV, that's where they go. So all sources drive web. And now you've got more lead aggregators, partnerships, more tools that have ever been available before in a

in a marketplace that some would argue is seeing less demand than during COVID. Although the demand is still really high when you consider what pre-COVID was, it's not exactly what the COVID times were. So it's less efficient now than anyone would like it. So we are taking the approach of we recognize where the challenges are by channel. And when you have 280 locations, you have 288 data points to really pick from.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (24:21.718)
you

Rathna Ramakrishnan (24:25.803)
Right.

Michael Hoy (24:47.829)
And that times however many campaigns you're running, what your offers are, to really have a wide swath of testing going on all the time while you're still trying to generate leads for today. So I think what you're going to see from not only us, but the industry as a whole is we're all going to get better at digital. The bigger players such as us probably have an advantage in terms of just resources and the amount of effort and dollars we're putting into it.

But at the end of the day, everybody's gonna have to figure out how to get better at digital or they're gonna get left behind. So that's where we're putting our effort and focus right now, along with all the other channels that are available to ensure that we're doing everything we can to continue our growth.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (25:30.102)
Nice. Do you use text marketing today to promote your offers to your clients?

Michael Hoy (25:37.005)
We We do through several different platforms. Again, more testing. And most of these platforms were in place for the businesses we purchased or even prior to what we were using just with Patty on Stanix some years ago. there's lots of resources we're using in testing today to determine what's most effective.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (25:57.002)
And what about bots? Are you using bots for appointment setting like AI bots or you're still defaulting to the old fashioned, know, call center human being answering the homeowner and then booking an appointment or are you letting the homeowner engage with a bot to book an appointment?

Michael Hoy (26:03.265)
We have not done as much bots. I'll tell you, bots...

Michael Hoy (26:15.599)
We are not doing bots. We have put real live people on that because we just think the experience is better for the customer. It was amazing when we were doing chats in COVID early on with bots, we'd lose customers. As soon as we put a real human on it, people would actually ask if we were really human and we would say, sure, my name's so-and-so. And so we learned early on that that personalization, that people would use the technology.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (26:36.27)
You

Michael Hoy (26:45.429)
and use the tools as long as they didn't feel like they were just talking to a machine.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (26:48.856)
Right. There's several kinds of contractors that listen to my podcast. And if there is a younger pod, younger remodeler that's listening to the podcast and trying to make a decision about, you know, what do I do with marketing? I'm at a, you know, two million dollars in revenue and I want to really get to those $5 million in revenue. What would be a few bits of advice that you would give that remodeler who's probably scaled it with referrals, but you know, they want to really play with marketing right now.

Michael Hoy (27:14.177)
Yes.

Michael Hoy (27:19.053)
So there are a few fundamental things that you have to do in your business to be able to support investing in your growth. First of all, you don't need to be overly fancy. You don't need a BMW. You don't need a fancy truck. You don't need a big office that looked like a Taj Mahal. You don't need any of that. Your ultimate goal should be to keep your overhead and fixed expenses as low and as variable as possible.

so that you can ride the waves that the industry tends to throw at you. For someone who's never been through a recession before, we've really not had a recession since 2008, they don't know how to deal with that. So what I would say is keep yourself really humble, don't get too full of yourself, don't take too many distributions out of your business, and don't overspend on other things that aren't important. Keep yourself very flexible. If you do that,

You're going to have lots of high quality choices in terms of how much money you can invest in your sales and marketing machine. You never pull back on your sales and marketing machine. That is where your dollars should go. So if you're trying to figure out how to go from 1 million to 5 million, no fancy offices, no fancy showrooms. You don't need any of that. You need to save as much of your profitability so that you can be reinvesting it into your business from a sales and marketing standpoint.

So if someone wants to know how to go from 12 locations that we were back in 2018 to the 288 today doing everything we've done, it's we've not invested in a lot of fixed overhead. We've not invested in a lot of infrastructure that's not necessary. We've not taken giant distributions out of the business. We've reinvested the profits to make the marketing flywheel go.

That's how you build these types of enterprises.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (29:10.324)
Very cool. So, you you've got to keep your nose in the sales and marketing game and not have the fancy logo and trucks and scale. Excellent advice. Today's reviews are a big part of any business. When somebody is choosing to open up their wallets to do business with any brand, they want, you know, social proof. What did another homeowner think about this remodeler? Why should I choose you over the other choices that I have?

Michael Hoy (29:21.602)
Not necessary.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (29:40.301)
Do you have a strategy in place to gather these reviews as you finish projects and build those raving fans, homeowners? Or does it just happen organically where people are pleased and then they just go write a review? Or do you, as a team, have a strategy where you say, okay, let's for each of these brands get to 50 reviews or 100 reviews. How do you play that?

Michael Hoy (30:03.671)
Yeah, so there's really multiple strategies. I mean, if you've created such a great experience for the customer, many times they are asking where they can post a review. I wouldn't say that's not every opportunity or every job that we do, which is unfortunate because I think we're being surveyed to death. So I do think you need to create a really unique opportunity for the customer to want to give that review. And I think it needs to be very personal.

So our strategy is if we've earned the right, because the customer said they've had a great experience, we're going to ask them on a personal level through the installer, the salesperson, the design consultant, please go out and post a review, because it helps us help other customers know where to go. It's all about trust. And if you've got really great positive reviews online,

and you've got a lot more of those than you do negatives, people are typically gonna trust to at least give you the opportunity to welcome you into their home. So our strategy is create a great experience so we earn the right to ask. If we've earned the right to ask, we don't find many customers that won't say yes. So we also have some internal competition amongst the brands and even within the brands of...

How many reviews does a branch have versus jobs done? So we're constantly promoting that competitive spirit to see who can drive more positive reviews.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (31:28.618)
Very nice. Do you have any plans in place or a process in place to reach out to homeowners when the anniversary of a project completion hits? Like, you you built the patio or you did a complete remodel. Do you have a plan in place to touch bases with the homeowner and say, hey, homeowner, thinking of you, it's your one year anniversary. How are things? Or there's not enough time in the day to be doing those kinds of activities.

Michael Hoy (31:57.567)
Those types of activities are being done within the brand. So each one of the brands has a brand leader and somebody that leads their marketing efforts. Those types of activities are happening brand to brand. Sometimes they're sharing those across brands, but they're also changing it up. So I couldn't tell you specifically what every brand is doing every day, but I can tell you there's all kinds of unique opportunities for us to be touching our former customers and even potentially new customers.

to make sure that they recognize we're still here for them. And two, we'd love for them to refer us to their friends, family, or to refer another brand to their friends and family. So we are constantly touching customers in that way.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (32:40.392)
As the CEO of this many brands, do you have any tips or tricks to manage your time? Do you have like a morning routine or how you just get through your task list of things that you do? Because remodeling is such intense work. And when I speak to younger contractors that are just up and coming, it's juggling all of those tasks, Like customer service and what cool hacks can you share in terms of how you time manage or how you plan out your day? Anything you're willing to share about

Michael Hoy (33:02.68)
Yeah.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (33:11.428)
your skills.

Michael Hoy (33:13.027)
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's changed a little over the years as the business has evolved and gotten bigger. But there's a few things that have not changed that I've been doing since day one. I have something that's called breakfast with the data. So it's me and my coffee every morning in front of the most important dashboards in the company so that within 20 to 30 minutes every morning, I have a really good understanding of where we are as a business at that moment.

time based on how effective is the marketing, how are the sales, how's the performance of those sales, what's the install number, and then I'm not thinking about those items again until likely tomorrow. So I have a routine of things I look at every day, things I look at every week, things I look at every month, things I look at every quarter, and I keep that list in my computer and it's

It's habit now, but I've created the habit of here's what I feel like I need to know to know where I need to put my attention and support the business best. I then spend a lot of my time with my direct reports and my staff one-on-one throughout the week to connect with them on a personal level and professional level, find out where the business is from their perspective. What are we working on? How are our initiatives moving forward?

Now again, we have a fairly large team of people. If you're a one or two man show, that's a little harder for you to do. But I would really encourage anyone. You need to know where your business stands all the time. It changes day to day. This is a day to day type of industry. You need to have your dashboards and your data. Whatever truth is, truth over harmony. Make sure you understand what it is.

So you know where to put your effort and time to grow your business and focus on where your biggest opportunities are. So that would be my advice. That's how I manage my day, my week. It gets derailed quite often, but I always have my coffee and my data.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (35:14.829)
Amazing, I love that breakfast with your data. It's such a cool title. You should write a book about it.

Michael Hoy (35:21.11)
Yeah. My wife says I should write a book too. I'm not sure I'm going to. We'll see.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (35:26.698)
We all have an author inside us and a book inside us, you should write a book. You have such an interesting story. Do you land up spending a bunch of time in the field in the customer homes, or it's not one of the hats that you wear? you garner your information from your leaders, or do you land up going and actually looking at installs and projects, and how do you wear that hat as the CEO?

Michael Hoy (35:35.299)
Thank you.

Michael Hoy (35:54.989)
Yeah, you know, five years ago as a CEO, did a lot more of that. It certainly is not the same today as it once was. You know, if I'm going to come to one of our locations, I should have a damn good reason for being there. Otherwise, it could just be a distraction. One of the things I do every month is a one hour across the entire business live video of it's called Hanging with Hoy. And it's a lunchtime.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (36:09.565)
Right.

Michael Hoy (36:24.227)
We get several hundred employees every month that get on. I give a 10 to 15 minute update on what is happening around the company. I usually spotlight one of our brands and bring in a guest speaker or guest leader that maybe people don't know. And then it's 20 to 30 minutes of open question with me, anything anybody wants to ask. So it's completely unscripted. It's really about me connecting and driving culture. That's been the purpose of it. It's my favorite day of the month.

because I love the people. That's where if I have a superpower, it's how I connect with our employees, with our customers, with our teams. And I just love it. So that's my ability to get into the field more is through those types of engagements. Although I do get to some of our plants and our offices. And when I do, go there with a very specific purpose to make sure that it's not a disruptive thing to have the CEO in the building.

which I recognize it can be at times. So I'm pretty deliberate with my visits to the field.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (37:25.358)
So anybody in the field is welcome to come to those monthly meetings and hang out with you and ask questions no matter what level or title or they are within the organization.

Michael Hoy (37:35.779)
Yeah, I do that. That's scheduled for the third Wednesday or second Wednesday of every month. So everybody knows when it is. The other thing I do is on my email signature, I have a link to book time with me in 30 minute intervals. Anyone from anywhere can book 30 minute timeframes with me. I have vendors do it. I've had customers do it. I've had employees do it. I use that as an opportunity to leave some time open.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (37:49.878)
I saw that.

Michael Hoy (38:05.859)
for anybody who would like to bend my ear. And I typically find I learned something from every one of those conversations that either I didn't realize, maybe I misperceived, or that there's an opportunity I didn't even realize existed. So I love those intervals and I usually have one a day. So I do devote the time to making sure that people can spend time with me and I can spend time with them.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (38:28.364)
I guess this is the digital version of having an open door policy. Come on in, hang out with me and chat with me what's on your mind. Very cool. You mentioned plants. So do a lot of your brands produce a lot of the materials in-house or do you source?

Michael Hoy (38:34.006)
It is.

Michael Hoy (38:38.157)
Yep.

Michael Hoy (38:46.295)
Yeah, we're producing probably 80 % of what we sell in general. So we've got our window plant in the Cincinnati market that's producing for several brands. We've got our sunroom center of excellence and enclosure center of excellence in Northeast Ohio and Macedonia. We are not yet doing bath. It's certainly something we're going to evaluate. We've got the Engler aluminum and metal business over in New Jersey and then down in the Florida market in Tampa.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (38:52.846)
you

Michael Hoy (39:15.799)
God pray for Florida right now given the hurricane. But we do a lot of polling closures in some room down there and we have a plant there as well. So we like making what we sell. One, it's one stop accountability. The customer has no one to blame but us if something goes wrong. So we design it, we make it, we warrant it, we market it, we sell it, we install it. There's really no better message. There's only a few companies that do that nationally. So we're trying to find ways to leverage.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (39:17.026)
Yes, yes,

Michael Hoy (39:45.537)
that scale even more as we grow.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (39:47.48)
Nice. When you look at your career, if there is a younger contractor listening to this podcast, what do you think makes a difference? Was it a book that you read? Did you have a cool mentor? What is it that can really give you an edge to grow as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, in your opinion?

Michael Hoy (40:08.051)
that's a, that's, that's hard to answer, I'll give you a, I've had many, many mentors that I didn't know were mentoring me at the time. So as I've gotten older and I'm not old, I think my maturity began to catch up. I started realizing that people were taking a genuine interest in coaching me because I had something that they saw, whether they told me what it was or not. They were giving me advice unknowingly and.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (40:35.054)
you

Michael Hoy (40:37.291)
I always loved the idea of winning. So, you early on with when I met my wife, she would ask what drove me, you know, what is, why are you so driven? And I just used to say, I just want to win. When I'm asked that same question today, I still give the same answer. The difference is I understand that what winning now looks like and it's changed over the years. So it used to be winning was, it was good for me and my family and my paycheck and my career.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (41:03.502)
you

Michael Hoy (41:06.241)
Now winning looks for me as, you we're building something that's never been built before. So that is winning to me. Today winning is an opportunity to come onto this podcast and spend time with you. That's a win to me today. The ability to help develop our teams and our people, because now I've got maturity and experience. That is a win to me. So.

As I continue to develop in my own career, you know, I'm still learning how to be a CEO of a company of this size and learning how to be a good CEO at what we're going to look like in three or five years is probably very different than the way we look today. So I think this idea of being humble doesn't mean we're not driven, but finding ways that everybody wins. So if I win, I feel like everybody around me has to win. And that's what drives me to get better every day.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (41:59.534)
very neat. So you find that one spark that drives you and then you just kind of compounded it across your life from self to employees to teams to companies and just what a great story.

Michael Hoy (42:13.379)
Interesting advice I was given years ago was, know, you'll hear a lot, focus on your weaknesses. One of my weaknesses is patience. I'm probably never going to fix that. I might get a little better at it, but I'm probably not going to fix it. So the advice that was given is take all your strengths and focus on how to make yourself even better at those because it tends to bury everything that's a weakness. Doesn't mean you shouldn't focus on the weaknesses, but don't put all your effort there because your ability to change those may just be inherent.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (42:35.0)
Mm-hmm.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (42:42.231)
Mmm.

Michael Hoy (42:43.427)
Now, you gotta be a good human being, all of those things. If you're not a good human being, you better work on that first. But I think if people would focus more on what are they really good at and put more energy in just getting better incrementally there, that they'd find they have a lot more fun in their day and they're a lot happier and they can help other people with.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (42:48.451)
Right.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (43:02.666)
Excellent point. Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about your personal life. When you're not working and wearing all these hats and juggling these huge teams, what do you do for fun?

Michael Hoy (43:15.683)
wow, not as much as I'd like to. So I've been married, it's coming up on 27 years. I have two daughters, one 25, who's getting married in 10 days. So I do have a bit of a hobby right now with a wedding and writing my father's speech and writing checks, if you will. I got my dance down, I've got my welcome thing in, apparently there's sunglasses involved, I was told, so I got a little cold.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (43:20.494)
Congratulations.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (43:25.037)
Nice!

Rathna Ramakrishnan (43:34.226)
practicing your dance

Rathna Ramakrishnan (43:41.811)
Have fun.

Michael Hoy (43:45.213)
my other daughter actually works for a great day. She's an FP and a, she lives in Daytona beach again, pray for her. She's down there during this hurricane, her and her guy, he's in flight school. So I'll you what I've really enjoyed is, you know, I always, one of my goals was that my adult children would, you know, somebody would approach them and say, your dad made a difference in my life. And I love being around my adult kids. So, that's a lot of fun for me. I'd say that that's a hobby.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (44:08.029)
Yes.

Michael Hoy (44:14.923)
My wife and I are now empty nesters. So we're learning how to reconnect, I'd say, in some ways. And we've been traveling a lot more. We have more of that on our to-do list. And other than that, we really just like being with people. So I'd say my hobby is friends and family. That's pretty much all I do. I do have a muscle car, which I like to play around with. But other than that, I'm not too much into other hobbies. I like to be with my friends and my family.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (44:43.21)
Excellent. Sound like a great dad.

Michael Hoy (44:50.23)
I hope.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (44:50.553)
Fantastic. Well, congratulations on the upcoming wedding. I hope you have a blast and you make a ton of memories. It's always, as a mom, I adore time with my children. I, just like you, I wish to have, you know, a fun relationship with them as they become adults.

So as a closing question, where do you think the remodeling industry is going? We had that surge in remodeling during 2020, during the pandemic when everybody was just home and looking around and saying, hey, maybe I could improve this, I could change that. And then it's kind of been bumpy, but where do you think the, what are you predicting for 2025 and beyond for the next five years?

Michael Hoy (45:31.885)
Well, we're really bullish and we're kind of eternal optimists as entrepreneurs are. We take every problem as an opportunity. But if you just look at the macro environment, I you have 50 % of the people in the country today that have a single family home, own it outright. So are you really gonna refinance it at the higher interest rates that we've seen the last couple of years? The answer is probably not.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (45:33.422)
.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (45:51.694)
Mm.

Michael Hoy (45:57.023)
even if you can afford to because there's been a lot of uncertainty about the marketplace and is there going to be a recession? I think we've been talking recession now for three years, so that's not overly helpful. The people that do have mortgages tend to have rates that are extremely low and they're not going to trade up in terms of the cost unless they absolutely have to. We're starting to come out of that. We're also in an age where a lot of the homes that were built during the boom of

Rathna Ramakrishnan (46:13.41)
Right.

Michael Hoy (46:23.267)
caught 1999 to 2006 or seven are at their prime remodeling age. So those homes need to be remodeled. If you read Design to Report or anything from even John Burns, everyone's predicting a pretty robust, if you wanna call it we're in a recession, I don't know, but a recovery. The remodeling market is like a beach ball being held underwater right now and it's going to pop through. So we're super optimistic.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (46:27.021)
Mm.

Michael Hoy (46:52.311)
We've continued to spend on marketing aggressively to ensure we're in a good position when things quote recover. But we're really bullish about what the future looks like. We think that this is a great space to be in and we planned, as I said earlier, we feel like we're just getting started.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (47:08.778)
Incredible. Cool. Very cool. Yep. I think there is an upswing ahead of us in the remodeling industry. And if you study the pandemic that happened in the 1900s, it took five years to snap out of it. So we're coming up on that five year mark. And then, you know, hopefully the upswing is going to happen. So excited to see what's in store for the remodeling industry. So thank you again. I really appreciate your time. It was a delight to hang out with you.

Michael Hoy (47:35.555)
Thank you.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (47:37.922)
Thanks again.

Michael Hoy (47:39.316)
Anytime, we've kind of stayed under the radar for a period of time, but I'm learning that these opportunities are, I think, really important. We want to be a help to the industry, not a hindrance. So anytime we can do that, we'd like to do that.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (47:52.28)
Thank you. Thank you. I do have contractors who are camera shy and podcast shy, but they have amazing stories. If you were to help me convince a contractor why they should be on this podcast, what would you tell them? What was the cadence of the questioning? Did you enjoy chatting over here?

Michael Hoy (48:13.901)
So I love people. I'm not very shy. What I would say is anytime you have a chance to have an audience, all that can come from it is opportunity. So if someone is thinking about looking for a new career, Great Day might be a place that they would consider today that they hadn't considered before. Or if someone is considering their next season and an exit of their company in the future and they're still wondering what Great Day is all about.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (48:16.385)
Yeah?

Michael Hoy (48:43.031)
They may have learned something today. if you're anyone that could use just a little air time, you never know what's gonna come from it. All it takes is one person to reach out and create a new relationship and to me that would be a win.

Rathna Ramakrishnan (48:56.33)
Excellent point. Thank you so much. Thank you again, Michael. It was a pleasure.

Michael Hoy (49:01.601)
Yep, take care. Thank you. Good luck.