Scaling a High-End AV Business: Growth Strategies with Andrew Schneider of The Wiring Guy

Audio Transcript

Mark Lamberth:
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Contractor to Grow Show. My name is Mark Lamberth, and today I’m talking with Andrew Schneider, the wiring guy in Calabasas, California. Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today.

Andy Schneider:
Hey Mark, thanks for having me on the show today. Appreciate it.

Mark Lamberth:
Fantastic. So I see you guys have been in business for a while, looks like you guys are up to a number of different things. Maybe you could tell us about the business and history and what you guys are up to right now.

Andy Schneider:
Sure, sure, absolutely. I’ve been doing the wiring guy now 28 years. Wow. It’s been a while. We’ve been at an official business, I was just looking last week, about 25 years. I’ve been doing it 28 years. And the wiring guy, we are a low voltage company, so we specialize in home theater, home audio, everything from security, surveillance, anything that you would need on the low voltage side. The line I like to use is anything that won’t kill you kind of thing, and that’s more of the electrical stuff. We are licensed electricians though, and we hold that license so that we can do things like putting outlets behind TVs and things like that. So when we’re hanging televisions for clients, we don’t need to call in an electrician separately.

Mark Lamberth:
Fantastic. So have you guys been doing the low voltage side of this the whole time?

Andy Schneider:
We have. That’s my preferred thing. As a young kid, I always enjoyed tinkering with electronics and things like that and whatever it is, and so that was the direction I went and it’s grown over the last 20 plus years, which is great. And I happen to be in a wonderful market where it’s the 1% of the 1% kind of thing where if somebody is going to spend money and whether the economy is down, so maybe they’re not going to spend X, they’ll spend Y, but people are still spending money in our market, so I’m fortunate for that.

Mark Lamberth:
This is the high end market, I mean, that’s what you mean.

Andy Schneider:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So we’re in southern California. Our clientele is anywhere from Malibu to the area that we reside in, which is Calabasas Hidden Hills, which is the Beverly Hills of the San Fernando Valley. We do work with clients in Beverly Hills, those areas, and so we’re fortunate.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay. And then Andrew, when you are working on projects like this, we’ve talked with various folks in the AV space and low voltage and you have kind of a unique situation where is it correct that you need to come in and kind of work with design in many cases, way upstream of the process, potentially long before the thing starts to get built? Because you’re, I mean, there’s a huge design component that comes into this, correct?

Andy Schneider:
Absolutely, absolutely. In some of our projects, the basic stuff just happens fluidly, but more of what you’re talking about is, and I’ve got a great project that, for example, we started a project over a year ago and we are just now starting to wire the project. So a year ago we sat down with architects, interior designers, the contractor, and they refined this project for over a year before we were even able to get in the door to put one foot of cable in. So absolutely, and every client is different. Sometimes we work with clients that have an interior designer and that interior designer calls the shots if she says she doesn’t like where a speaker is going or a TV is hung or whatever, you need to respond to that and make the change.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay. How many people on your team right now?

Andy Schneider:
Currently we are running a team of, well I’ll say five and a half, but we’re really six. It is myself. We have an office person who does everything from our internal stuff, hr, payroll, that kind of stuff in the office. And then we have four in the field and it’s a combination of tech guys and guys that are wire pulls and things like that.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay. Do you have to bring on other subs at all? I’m not familiar.

By the way, we do Webinars to teach you how to grow. You can access those here.

Andy Schneider:
Exactly. Absolutely, absolutely. Depending on the size of the project. Our typical project is anywhere from let’s say maybe four 5,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet on a house. Currently we are working two projects that are two 24,000 square foot homes, at which point we will be bringing on a group of other subs just for our pre-wire.

Mark Lamberth:
Amazing. Wild. So I mean your team may grow up with the subs and things mean maybe up at even 10 to 12 people at different times, kind of

Andy Schneider:
Including the sub? Depends. Typically on the subs we could be bringing an additional two, an additional four kind of subs on. The problem is it’s not always about throwing as many people at the problem, but it’s coordination. It is stepping on top of each other because let’s say an example on these bigger projects, all the wire is going to the same exact spot, so I can’t have eight guys all trying to get wire down a four inch hole at the same time kind of thing.

Mark Lamberth:
Got it. Okay. So did you already live in Calabasas? I love Southern California. We’ve lived in San Diego at different times and it’s just beautiful down there. Had you already lived in Calabasas and grown up there and sort of found this work and this sort of niche that you’re working in or was it somehow the other way around because

Andy Schneider:
It’s definitely the other way around. I was born and raised in Chicago, made my way out to Arizona where I went to school at the University of Arizona, and from there I came out to Los Angeles and from there I was in Sherman Oaks area, which is about 15 miles east of where we currently are, about 15 minutes or so. And then when I started a family, I wanted my kids to go to a little bit of school system, things like that. I found myself moving west, which is where Calabasas is, and we’ve been here now 21 years.

Mark Lamberth:
Okay. I mean, the reason why I ask is because being in a high end area can be really, really helpful for business. I mean, where the fluctuations of the economy are going up and down and home building is really, or addition or the work that you’re doing is at a lower level of the market, maybe fluctuate a lot more, but when you’re in a higher end market, there’s a lot less of that fluctuation and basically there’s these high end properties being wired and the work being done on a consistent basis, not as sort of sensitive to the economy.

Andy Schneider:
Correct? Correct. That’s sort of what I implied to a little bit earlier was that basically even if the economy does fluctuate, the nice part is, okay, so our client doesn’t spend X dollars, they’ll spend Y dollars, but they’re still spending something which is still enough for us to put together a decent system for them or whatever it may be, but it may not be a hundred percent of what they wanted, but it’ll be 75%.

Mark Lamberth:
That’s great. Regarding sort of the business and how you have grown, I mean it sounds like just a lot of word of mouth. Do you guys also do some advertising and other outreach to get new customers?

Andy Schneider:
We have done a little bit of that. The thing is we do more word of mouth, especially from the area we’re in. I typically, all of our vehicles are white vans. We’re not advertising that way, but the word of mouth thing has definitely worked. I work with a handful of contractors, so they’re bringing us work every month or two. A different contractor has a project for us, so that helps out. But we have done some advertising. In the early days, there was different websites that it was almost the Angie’s list type thing of websites. There’s phone installers.net and some of these other websites and I got my name on there and I would get a variety of calls from there. That’s number one. Another one is also we get our manufacturers tend to refer us. So because we’re a manufacturer’s rep or a dealer for a variety of product, if a customer calls in, they may say, Hey, I purchased this new house, it has system X, Y, or Z in it. Who do you refer? And I happen to be someone that way. But when it comes to traditional advertising, running a website, running ads, things like that, we typically don’t do that anymore.

Mark Lamberth:
And I mean you guys at the sweet spot of growth where you guys want to be, or do you think that you guys will grow some over the next few years?

Andy Schneider:
That’s the million dollar question. And I’ve thought about this repeatedly, yes, it’d be nice to grow, but with growing comes a variety of different things to consider. In my case, what is that investment going to look like? What do I need the way of more vehicles? How do I manage a crew of an additional two or four guys full time if we do have a slowdown, which slowdowns do occur, and I actually welcome them when they do occur because finally I get to stop and breathe because we’re running a million miles an hour. The guys, are you nervous? I’m like, no, I’m not nervous. I go, you guys have been working 10, 12 hours a day. Aren’t you happy that we can work a six or eight hour day this week and we’ll pick it back up next week?

Mark Lamberth:
Right?

Andy Schneider:
So it all comes down to that kind of stuff. But there’s a couple different ways I go back and forth every month or two or year how I’m going to grow the business. Yeah, I’d like to grow the business. I’d like to take it to that next level. I mean, there’s a variety of ways in the business we will use different tiers. There’s the guys that have one or two guys and maybe they’re doing half a million dollars to a million dollars a year, and then what’s the trick to get from a million to 2 million? That kind of stuff. And then I think once you get over, at least in our market space, that $2 million in revenue type business, then you got to really decide where you make that investment. I was taught there’s two different ways of doing it. One way is add more people and more resources to grow that business or work with higher end clientele and sell higher end margin based equipment. Sell them the more expensive speakers, the higher end sound systems, someone who’s willing to invest in bigger security packages and things like that, at which point with the same amount of people you can get to that ultimate goal.

Mark Lamberth:
Interesting. Either of those you prefer?

Andy Schneider:
I would probably prefer to sell the higher end equipment and maybe make some more margin. Do I sell the entry level speaker at $300 a pair and make a hundred bucks or sell ’em the thousand dollars speaker and make $300? Because the bottom line is it’s the same hole that’s getting cut. It’s the same wire and I’m mounting it the same way, but in this case, I’m making more money putting in a more expensive speaker than a basic speaker.

Mark Lamberth:
That makes a lot of sense to me too. That’s something that we’re always trying to figure out how to help our clients do, is to ultimately go talk to higher end clients themselves and be able to be more selective with the jobs that they do and make more revenue with the same type size of team that they have now.

Andy Schneider:
And there’s many different ways, and we had talked about it, but the thing is, it’s sort of like my office person keeps saying, well, hey, I’m going to go do some more marketing, do more marketing, or I’ll talk to more contractors, and then I sort of put the brakes on it like, well, okay, great. Now all of a sudden if you go out and meet another contractor or another person and now they’re throwing, let’s say three or four or five, six big jobs at us a year now, okay, now am I at the point where I need to hire the more people, get more resources and vehicles and maybe more warehouse space or depending on what I might need to make this all happen. So you got to really say, okay, where do you want to be? Do you want to be a crew, a small crew in this case, five, six people, or do you want to be 15, 20 people?

Mark Lamberth:
Yeah, that is the question, right?

Andy Schneider:
Yeah.

Mark Lamberth:
Good stuff. Well, fantastic. Andrew, this is super helpful, some great information here. I’ve taken some notes. If folks are interested in doing some low voltage AV work and some design, getting some high end installation done with low voltage and with speakers and their sound system, then Calabasas or surrounding area, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Andy Schneider:
Well, there’s a couple different ways of doing that. We have, you can give the office a call and our office phone number is (818) 451-4511. You can also probably check out our website, which is not fully complete, but gives you some general idea, which is vault wiring guy.com. So that’s probably the two best ways to get ahold of us and hopefully we can put something together for you and go from there.

Mark Lamberth:
Perfect. Yeah, so the wiring guy.com and Calabasas. Fantastic. Andrew, this is great for our listeners. A lot of good information here. Thank you for being on the show today.

Andy Schneider:
Great, mark. Thanks for having me. I greatly appreciate it.