#156 LEGENDS: From the Trades to $110 Million with Nexgen Founder Ismael Valdez

**Ismael Valdez** (0:00)
We did like $1.2 million in revenue in my garage in four months.
You can get from to 10 in a snap of a finger. Gross Profit will tell you how much of a badass negotiator you are. Don't forget that the floor is one inside the home. Dude, if I have one message for 100 million dollar mark, it's not for everybody, man.

**John Wilson** (0:35)
Two months ago, we got our call center on Avoca. And Avoca is a AI call center solution for home service companies just like me, and probably just like you. They have a couple different products, but the one that we like the most is their Coach product, which listens to every single phone call and runs it through a rubric to help our call takers improve. And this is a really big deal because we take hundreds, sometimes thousands of phone calls every single day, and it's just too much for our trainers and managers and leads to keep up with and effectively train. So it lets us do ride alongs on almost every single call every day. Click on the link below to go to Avoca and make sure you use the promo code Owned for a special discount. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today we have Ismael Valdez on with us. Welcome to the show.

**Ismael Valdez** (1:18)
How are you guys?

**John Wilson** (1:19)
Good. We're good. We're excited to have you here. Very excited. You founded Nexgen. You took it from nothing to something. And we're really pumped up to bring you on to our Legends series and talk about what that looked like. Do you think you could spend a minute or two and just walk us through the Nexgen story?

**Ismael Valdez** (1:40)
Of course. Of course. First, congratulations on the podcast, guys. I love doing these podcasts. The name is dope, too. Owned and Operated because 99% of these podcasts that I do, they have no fucking clue of what we got to go through of the everyday grind. So that's cool that you guys are doing this for the trades and that you guys are still in the grind and the trenches doing it. Because, like I said, 99% of these guys don't have a clue of what we fucking got to go through every day to make sure that our operations run smoothly, to make sure that we're profitable, to make sure that we're employing people, to make sure that we're doing the actual things that we need to do to keep the operation going. So, congrats on the podcast, and congrats on owning the business. And it's hard to do both, and I applaud you guys. So, my name is Ismael Valdez, bro. I started Nexgen Air Conditioning in 2018, late 2017, going into 2018 I think I got my license in January 2018, around there. For those of you who don't know me, it was a pretty fast growth. At the time, I thought it was normal for people to do this, but I guess when I started exposing myself to social media and I started talking to people, people were blown away by the journey, the short journey that we had. Our first year in business, we were all HVAC. For the first three years, for the first four years, actually, we were all HVAC. Heating and air conditioning, retail residential, no Costco, no Home Depot, no those, none of that. It was just strictly marketing. First year, we did 9.8 mil. Second year, we did 18.2 mil. Third year, we did 24 I think going on our fourth year, we went up to 32 million. Huge mass growth, man. Like I said, at the time, I didn't really know that what we were doing was special, because I was so deep into the trenches, hiring people, recruiting people, marketing, figuring out the pay structures, figuring out what incentivizes who to be able to push the revenue, where the profits are. So obviously, you guys know what I'm talking about, right? Trying to figure out the everyday grind and the everyday cycle. So a couple of years ago, I sold to Private Equity. It was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Ended up going to a ranch group. I think I sold it when I was doing $109 million revenue in one year. It's pretty dope.
Six different locations in Southern California when we sold.
A ton of good things came out of the cell. One of the best things that came out of the cell was my Nuve Thermostat, which we're going to talk about it. But just a quick who I am, how I got here. I got into the trade zone when I was 18 years old. I was working at a supply house named Howard Industry, which distributed American Standard Equipment. Most of you guys back East know about American Standard and Train. So I worked there for about eight, nine years and I probably had 10,000 job offerings every single day. Contractors like yourselves would come up to the counter and buy equipment for me, buy parts for me and I would bullshit with them. I would talk to them. I would ask them a million questions because I have a really curious mind of asking a million questions. So contractors like yourself would come in here and just buy equipment from us and I would ask them a million questions and that's how I got into the contracting side. After I figured out that you fuckers were making all the money, I'm like, how am I doing here? So it took me eight years to realize that you guys were doing all that, and that you guys were making all the money. So that's when I started to jump on the other side of the counter and kind of started on the contracting side. But a couple of years later, we started Nexgen in between those couple of years. I started a company called RHA and then there was another company called Home Comfort USA, which we did pretty dope things on too. We got it from zero to $21 million in 40 years, which was a pretty fast growth too. That was my first kind of exposure to like, man, you could actually make some really, really good money doing air conditioning. I mean, so I don't want to bore you guys too much.