Industry Voices: Service Business Mastery's Tersh Blissett

Intro

Tersh Blissett is the host of Service Business Mastery, one of the industry’s largest podcasts, and owner of Service Emperor and Tri-Star Heating Air & Plumbing.

We sat down to discuss his background and how he runs his businesses. Below is a summary of our conversation, edited for clarity:

How’d you find yourself in the HVAC industry?

I went from high school to the Air National Guard and ended up doing a tour with the Air Force. Afterward, I finished college and I worked as an engineer but hated it. I asked my Dad what I should do next, and he said I should go work for his friend’s electrical company. I said no because of the unprofessional stigma. 

I’m into cars and had a car friend get me a job with him working for an air conditioning company. Seven years later, we grew the company to $8m in revenue from $1m — through the recession. 

After that, I did a stint at another HVAC company before starting my own six months later.

You host one of the industry’s largest podcasts, Service Business Mastery. What’s the story behind that?

In 2017, the drive from my kid's school to my office was over an hour, so every day I had a couple of hours of drive time where I listened to books. At some point, I switched to podcasts. I searched for HVAC podcasts, and other than Bryan Orr’s HVAC School — which is technical, not business-focused — there were none.

I eventually got invited to his podcast and got to know him. A week after we recorded my episode, I reached out and asked him if he was going to start a business-focused one. He told me that I should do it myself and that he’d show me everything there is to know about how to start a podcast. 

So I ran with my own idea and spent a year under his wing. If it weren’t for Bryan, I would have never made it past the third or fourth episode. A great thing about it, too, is that it forced me to get out of my comfort zone because I never was able to talk in front of people in the past. 

Now, we get about 130,000 downloads a month, and the last I checked, the next HVAC business one gets about 20,000.

What’s it like running multiple service companies and your podcast at the same time?

I actually run all of my companies remotely. I have a pretty rigid schedule and manage my time well, but I’ve been remote since day one and both of my service companies are paperless. 

People thought I was crazy when I told them I wanted to do it remotely, but Covid helped. I focus a lot on automation and leveraging new technologies. For example, I use Slack to automatically message employees to get pulse checks from them throughout the day.

Customer reviews get auto-sent to Slack to highlight the teammate who drove it, and anything under 4 stars gets flagged for management to review. ChatGPT responds to reviews instantly, and to some of my emails, too. Zapier runs all of this — it integrates everything I use. I have around 2,500 Zaps that go out every month.

What have you learned from the podcast that you’ve applied to your service companies?

This was another reason I started the podcast — to benefit the service businesses. Probably half of everything we do now came from what I learned from guests on the show. 

Some of the best have been marketing strategies and ideas. We had an episode once where we talked about optimizing Google My Business, which is now Google Business Profile, and I didn’t publish the episode for six months because I wanted to try everything out on my own first.

Other than Google-related stuff, there have been some good nuggets on building out processes. Al Levi’s been a guest a couple of times. 

Talk to me about entrepreneurship.

You can’t be friends with employees as much as you want to. I hired a friend as a service tech once and he became resentful toward me because I had to hold him accountable. 

Best practice groups have helped me a ton. I’m in a group chat of four owners across the country and we meet on Zoom once a week to talk about ups and downs, answer questions, and motivate each other. 

I’m thinking about starting a masterminds group with more owners and managers to shoot the breeze and hold each other accountable, because nobody at church, the bar, or kids’ baseball games knows what you’re going through unless they’re a business owner. 

I’ll go to a family reunion and hear people talking about things and think to myself, “Man, it’d be amazing if that were my only problem.”

What keeps you up at night?

Thinking about the families of team members. If a teammate is struggling in any way, I’m worried about how it’s impacting their family. We have a lot of responsibilities and people are relying on us to not let the ball drop. I don’t want to let our teammate's families down.

Then cash flow, of course. I always want more. It ranges depending on the day, but sometimes I’m hyper-focused on growing the top line, and other times I’m like, “This is killing our bottom line.” The top line is a vanity number, and the bottom line is what matters, but teammates need to hear the top line number to stay motivated. 

If you could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be?

My grandpa. My name’s actually David the third, and Tersh is short for Tertiary, which is Latin for “Third”. He was the first generation of David and passed away during Covid. I’m him made over. 

I lived with him for several months before deploying for the Air Force. We live on 250 acres and he used to be around every weekend, always with my kids. He made a massive impact on us.

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