From Plumber To Podcaster: Mitch Smedley - Smedley Plumbing

SPEAKER_00 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. Mitch Smedley, welcome to the show, brother. How's it going, man? Oh, it's going great, dude. I'm glad we finally got a chance to do this. I know we've been chatting about it for a minute and uh from one podcaster to another. And uh, of course, Apex brought us together. Um, I'd say about what a a good year and change. How long have you been doing that?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Yeah, a little a little over a year ago. And you and I connected pretty early in the whole thing. Yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Well, that's the beauty of that network, you know, is that you you really get to create I thought about this this morning because sometimes I don't have you ever gone through that and you're like, I feel like I need new friends, not because they're bad friends, but because everybody life just happens and everybody kind of get, you know, we we all started on the same highway and everyone gets off on a different exit, right? But then I thought I was thinking about that this morning again, and I thought, oh, how many friends do I have in Apex? I probably have a laundry list that I could just pick up the phone and call. Right. That's you know, that's the beautiful part of it of a community and network.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah, yeah, that's that's been kind of the interesting thing with the entrepreneurial journey is you you transition away from certain friends groups and you gravitate towards others, and even those are temporary as you grow at different rates and and move on to different friend groups because you're if you're doing it right, you're constantly in search of friends that are lifting you up. So yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Exactly. I couldn't agree with that more. So I love to tell people's story um on this show, and I want to back up a little bit and just for some context, let's help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you, your backstory, how you got into business, how your brand became what it is right now. Um, let's just unpack that and take us back a minute.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Yeah. So uh uh I'm a plumber. Uh I have a plumbing company here in the Kansas City area. And my first day as a plumber was actually 9-11. Uh everybody, yeah, everybody remembers where they were that day. And it makes it pretty easy to for me to remember my first day as a plumber uh because uh I I was uh working with the owner. It was a very small shop out in the country, and uh, you know, your first day at small shops, you're typically working hand in hand with the owner. And he was the type of guy that doesn't listen to the radio throughout the day. And we were working in the basements of new homes. We were putting all the plumbing in that goes underneath the concrete floor in a basement. So it was only he and I on the job site, nobody else. We worked uh three different job sites that day, all day long, never listened to the radio, never nothing. I called my parents that afternoon. I was only 19. Uh, called my parents that afternoon and and let them know how my first day went at my new job. And they they were like, Oh, you haven't heard. And I'm like, What do you mean? And so they said, You need to get home and watch the news and then call us. They didn't even tell me what had happened. And so I get home that day and I watch the news and I'm like, holy cow, you know. But uh yeah, makes it makes it pretty easy to remember your your first day in your forever career. Yeah, you got an anniversary coming up, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and ironically, um uh just uh about a month and a half ago, I went on a school trip with my son to New York, and we went to the 9-11 memorial. Um, and then that was so cool. We didn't actually get to tour the 9-11 museum, and so I took my wife there for our anniversary um and made sure that we got to tour the museum. So got a little wristband for the 9-11 memorial on there.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Very cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of neat.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah, it is New York's a special place, especially uh the way they've been able to uh memorialize um that that that crazy you know event and happening uh in our in our lifetime, which was I totally remember, you're exactly right. You always remember where uh you were when that happened. Um so you say fix pipes, pet dogs. Is that is that the correct phrase?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Yeah, that's our uh there we go. That's our that's our logo or our slogan, I mean.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

So I understand the fixing pipes part. Is it just because you're a dog fan that it says pet dogs?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Uh part of it's that. Uh part of it is some subliminal messaging to the customers. So, like every home that we go into, um, we uh there's always a matter of conversation about the dog. You know, do you like dogs? Do you not like dogs? Do we need to put the dog away, you know, or do you need to greet the dog or whatever the case may be? And so we decided to just kind of hit that nail on the head right from the get-go, and we made it part of our brand. We've got a dog on the logo, and um, you know, we basically it just established to everybody that we're very dog friendly, and customers respond to that, you know, really well. So um uh I, you know, decided we're just gonna come up with the slogan fix pipes, pet dogs. And it's it's currently trademark pending right now, too. So that's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

I love that. I absolutely love that. So you've been an entrepreneur and business owner for a minute then.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Yeah, three years. Uh uh, we just passed our third birthday as a company. Um, so it really, in the grand scheme of things, I started my own plumbing company a lot later than most. You know, most guys start their plumbing company because they've been in the business for three to five years, and they think, you know, they know better than their boss, and they get mad at their boss one day and they tell them to F off and they quit. And and then they go start their own business. And I stayed in the industry for a long time before starting our company. And I specifically selected positions in management at different organizations and different levels of organizations to get the the experience I needed, so we would have a lot fewer ups and downs along the way. That's smart.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Get in, get the get the you know, get paid to get the experience. Yeah, and then once you have enough experience under your belt and you understand how every single area of the business works, right? Then you most people don't do you're exactly right. They have a bad day, or do they don't like what they're doing, they're not happy. Uh, they you know, they they uh they move on to what what appear to be greener pastures, which often you know tends to be dog poop and high weed and I and yeah, high weeds, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

And a and a septic issue under underneath, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the you know, I the the biggest benefit that I found from it was managing people. You know, a lot of guys that just tell their boss to screw off one day and then they they start their own thing, they don't know how to lead people and they don't know how to manage people, and so um, you know, all the different facets of leadership kind of came into play there and it makes it uh makes it for a lot less turnover and it makes it for a lot better culture within our own company. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, what's the best part about being an entrepreneur? Um, for me, it's you know, a lot of people say the freedom, and and uh I think a lot of people mess that up, right? They they think freedom and they think you have all this time on your hands. You don't have any more time on your hands than anybody else, and if anything, you probably got less. But for me, it's it's more like that the clock doesn't exist anymore. So, like if I want to take a few hours in the middle of the day and go watch my kids' school performance, I can. And then I can choose to just work later. I can schedule myself around that. Whereas when you're working for somebody else, somebody else is in charge of your schedule. And so it makes it a little difficult to have that freedom over your life events and and scheduling time for your kids and your family and and all of that. So that's probably the biggest benefit for me. Um, second to that is having a big impact on as many people as I can. Um, you you can have an impact on people when you're working for a company, but you can have a bigger impact on people when you own the company because you get to call the shots, right? So um we do some things within our company that no other companies do, and it's simply because I made the decision to do them as the owner, and I was not allowed to make those decisions as a manager or as an employee at other companies.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Yeah. And and I think that a lot of times we we take that freedom for granted, I think, with being an entrepreneur. I mean, I I have to stop myself often and be like, I literally do whatever I want. Yeah. Like my client, my my clients who often become friends and I usually have a great relationship with, um, they're they're the boss. Yeah. The customer's the boss. Once you start to find my team is is um is is my boss. Right. I I work for them, but not not not the other way around. And that that affords you the opportunity to be able to have that freedom, I think. Yeah, is that is the mindset of that, you know?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah. Yeah. That's the it it it I I look at leader, you know, a lot of people look at leadership like a pyramid where you the bottom row of the pyramid's the biggest, and that's where all the field workers are, and then you got the middle row of the managers and then the the owner at top. And I look at that like that pyramid's upside down, where I'm working for the managers and the managers are working for the field workers type of thing, and you know, servant leadership type stuff. So yeah, um, and and then again, you know, a lot of people misconstrue that freedom to think you have all this time on your hands, but you still have to have the discipline to apply the time, you know, appropriately. And um, you know, yeah, sure, the temptation may be there to loaf off all day long and not do anything, but um, you know, there's there's more opportunity out there if you just stick, you know, stick with it and keep keep working away.

SPEAKER_00 9:45

That gets boring though. It does sitting around doing nothing. Like even on like vacation. I'm like day day four of the cruise. I'm like, get me out of here.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah. Dude, we literally Sunday, just two days ago, we came back from a week in Mexico. And by let's see, we got there on a Sunday, and I'm gonna say by Wednesday or Thursday, by Wednesday night, like we were already kind of looking forward to coming home. So we I I kind of work on the adage of like work hard, play harder. And when you play as hard as we do, you kind of get tired of play sometimes, and it's like, man, I'd love to go back to just work.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Right, exactly. It's kind of rejuvenating, but again, that's all part of lifestyle design. Somebody told me a long time ago, if you want to have a lifestyle business, you've got to have a lifestyle. So I've built my business around my lifestyle instead of building my lifestyle around my business.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not I'm not quite there yet. We're close. Um, I'm trying to build like a legacy business. A lot of people in the trades industry will do a lifestyle business where they're just trying to make more than what they were when they were working for somebody else and you know, trying to speed up retirement by a couple of years or whatever the case may be. But I'm we're we're trying to put together a business that will live long beyond me on this earth. And so um, you know, doing that requires a little bit of a different approach and the the lifestyle piece is coming, um, but it's just been a lot more reinvesting back into the company in these early years.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Absolutely. That's smart. You know, I mean, you know, you know where you're where you're headed, what you want to do, what the ultimate uh goal is for what you're doing. Another thing that I think is grossly underrated to to figure out as a business owner and entrepreneur is you know, what are you doing this for? And being able to get very clear on that because that translates throughout the entire company, internally and both externally with your customers and your clients and how you actually show up as a brand. Right. Right. So let's talk about this podcast. Uh you've been uh podcasting for a minute now. What motivated you to start a podcast?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

So it's kind of funny. We I I started a podcast before I joined Apex and before I really even knew why you would have a podcast or what you can really do with it. Um so uh six well, four months into business, I wrote a book. And um, you know, I had put off starting our business for a long time because I had been told that, you know, it's really risky, and you know, you you can risk everything, you can lose everything, you can lose your house, your family, your kids, you know, all of the things. And and so I listened to that and and I shouldn't have. Um and not to say that there aren't risks in business, there absolutely are, but you can mitigate them tremendously just by applying yourself and and focusing on the customer. And so um, once we started our business, uh when I started my business, I borrowed $30,000 from myself to start the business. Basically, I took $30,000 uh out of savings and started the business. And I set myself a goal of paying back that $30,000 in three months. And everybody said I was crazy, but I worked day and night, weekends didn't matter, and I did it. In three months, I paid myself back the 30 grand. So me personally was back where I was before, and the business was substantiated. And so then a couple months later, we were still doing really, really well. And I thought, man, this is information. I need to put this into a book. So I wrote a book for how to start a trades-based business, a home service business. And then I tabled it for a while because I'm not a very good writer. I'm definitely not a very good reader. And uh then I got to thinking tradesmen that would want to read or that need this information probably don't read too many books. Um, in the in the trades world, you're not typically reading a lot of books until after you're a business owner. And so then I thought, well, they all have earbuds, they all have smartphones. So let's turn this book into a podcast and we'll get the information out onto the media ways that way. And really, the whole reason I was wanting to push the book idea anyway was just I wanted to add published author to my list of credentials, right? And so I'm like, well, podcaster is probably fairly similar to published author. I don't know. So we're just gonna run it through a podcast. So we ran the podcast for a year. Um, and I I financed the whole thing, funded the whole thing. I have a co-host on the podcast, neither one of us get paid. Uh, we joke around all the time that our I have an on-staff videographer with our plumbing company, and he's the highest paid guy on the podcast because he gets a check every week, and none of neither one of us do. So um, after about a year of doing the podcast, we had somebody reach out to us and want to sponsor our show. And um, they have a product that literally every single listener of our our podcast would entertain buying, and so it's kind of a perfect fit. And so we struck a small deal with them. It's nothing huge, it's $2,000 a year, is what they pay us to drop a 30-second commercial on each episode. So um, you know, we we dropped that 30-second commercial. They gave us like a little affiliate link so we could track how many people were signing up from our podcast. And within a week, they said like seven people already signed up. And we're like, holy cow, like podcasting's kind of weird because you're you kind of talk to your listeners, but you don't really get a ton of feedback unless they're emailing in questions and all of that kind of stuff. So you don't really get a feel for how engaged they are. Um, and so once we saw the results from that affiliate link, we're like, man, these people actually listen to what we do. And so we were already getting tons of questions from listeners for you know how to navigate all these different problems in business and everything else. And so we decided to start like a little mentorship program. We call it trade wins, like winning in the trades. And um, and you know, that's kind of taken off and in and run in that direction, but that wasn't really the intent when we started the podcast. When we started the podcast, it was just get a whole bunch of information out there to people that need it. And then um, somebody gave me some advice a while ago that said the information is free, but the implementation is is costly. Yeah, and so essentially that's what that's what we do with trade wins, the podcast, we deliver all the free impl uh information, and then with trade wins, um they'll you know, we have members in trade wins that pay us a monthly membership fee and we help them implement all of the information. So it's uh it's turned into being a really cool little thing. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Wow, what a great what a great story! And and you know, now you're really committed to this podcast thing because you have a model that works. Number one, uh, and number two, uh, it's phenomenal for your content game. Most important, you know, even more important than that, the community, but they all really work together, which I love. I love the story of how did you become a podcaster? It wasn't just this wild idea, it was it's like a it's like a game of chess, right? One move, you know, with these you're making these small moves every day that eventually turn in uh to big moves. And yeah, next thing you know, you've got an entire strategy that uh ultimately benefits your community and also your business and you and you know D, all of the above. So I love that. Uh congrats on that and and and and keep up the great work.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Yeah, yeah. Well, and with the with the way the trades spaces are going and the home service industries are going, the if you don't do the small business right, you get muscled out of the market. And bigger businesses are getting even larger. And then you have your your Googles and your Amazons and everything else that empower those bigger businesses to get even larger. And so um, again, it wasn't really the intent, but but the podcast and trade wins both really helps a smaller contractor get to a really healthy level. And um, in that way they can they can stay um they they can stay in a position where they're taking care of their community and they're taking care of their family and their people really, really well without having to worry about getting muscled out by big tech or by the big uh corporate investment firms that are that are buying up a lot of a lot of companies right now.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yeah, I love that. What advice do you have to give to people that are on a fence about starting a podcast?

SPEAKER_01 18:30

It for for us, it was just do it. Um you then the time is never right. Uh your first few episodes are gonna sound a whole lot different than your later episodes. Um, I think we're just putting it. Yeah, yeah. Like I don't want to say your first few episodes suck because you're you've got a passion and everything in the first. The the audio quality isn't the greatest. You know, your conversations, your issue, your your yums and your sows and and everything else are always there. However, you're still getting really, really good information out there. And you can't ever release a 100th episode unless you've released a first episode, right? So just get started and figure it out along the way. And nobody's gonna listen to your first shows. Um, so don't don't worry about the fact that you did all this work and you bought the camera and you bought the microphone and you you signed up with Sebastian and did all the things, and and and you're only getting 10 listeners or 100 listeners, like it takes time. Um, we actually uh be because we designed our podcast based off of a book, our first nine episodes, we call them our core episodes, that's where we drop all the knowledge from the book. And so essentially, I scripted our first nine episodes by reading the book that I wrote. And it was more in conversation form. It's not like I'm just sitting there reading a book. Um, you know, I was able to talk about all the things in depth with my co-host and everything else, but we reference back to those first nine episodes in almost every episode that we do. So our first nine episodes actually have more views than anything else because that's where a lot of the core information comes from. And then we get to extrapolate on that for all the future episodes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

We call those uh another another phrase for those are your pillar episodes. Okay, yeah. You'll you lay the foundation for the entire podcast. But you know, I love that it's a constant reference point back. Yeah. Number one, hey, go check out our podcast. Number two, make sure you start at the beginning because the first nine episodes are actually us teaching what we what we include in the book. So I love that.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, yeah. We we tell people like there's a couple of high point episodes along the way. Um, you know, we we tell them to go back to our first nine, we tell them to listen to like episode 36. That's where we talk about Google reviews, and we've got some like bullet point episodes that we want to make sure they hit, but we then we tell them like once you've listened to those, you don't you don't have to go through and listen to every single one since you can if you want, but you can jump right back into where we are, and and we're talking about you know current events and how they apply to being a business owner and the mindset of a business owner and and everything else. So yeah, love it.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Yeah. Well, Mitch, I love what you've created and built here. Uh, you're you're you're doing life the right way, you're doing business the right way, you're doing podcasting the right way. Podcasts suck if you don't have one. So you definitely don't fall into that category, Mitch. So keep rocking and rolling. As a fellow podcaster uh and a podcast coach, uh, I'm very, very encouraged by stories like this. Podcasting is my life's work. Uh, I get the opportunity to help people step into the role of becoming a podcaster. So being able to see encouraging stories like yours and seeing what uh you've been able to do with it and will continue to do uh just overjoys me. Is that a word? Overjoyed it is now. It is. It is overjoyed is absolutely a word. There we go. Uh so uh well again, thanks for taking some time out of your day to hang out with us here uh at Beyond the Story. Any final thoughts for our listeners, Mitch?

SPEAKER_01 22:03

And if you're if you're on the fence about starting a podcast, if you feel you've got information out there that people would want to hear, put it all together, organize it well, and just get running. There's there's there's nothing more to do than just start. You got to start with the first step and then put some measurable benchmarks in place, you know, your first hundred views, your first thousand views, or listens, or plays, or downloads, or whatever you want to, whatever you want to measure, and and and then just start working in that direction. And it will come together. I guarantee it. Is the the only way it won't come together is if you never start or if you quit.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Boom. That's a heck of a way to end an episode. Final thoughts from Mitch Smedley. Make sure you follow Mitch. I'll put all those links in the show notes. That's the description of this podcast episode in case you're wondering what the hell a show note is. Mitch, I appreciate you, my brother. It's a privilege to call you a friend and a brother uh to be running with you in Apex. I'm encouraged by your journey, your business, your podcast. Keep up the great work. Come back to the show sometime, will you? Will do, we'll do.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

I think next time we'll see each other in person is probably in October. Let's go. I can't wait. Looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

All right. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.