46. Building Strength in Business and Life with Matt Strong

November 20, 2025

Matt Strong and Eric Johnson explore the intersections of powerlifting, engineering, and entrepreneurship. They discuss the importance of communication skills, the journey of starting a business, and the value of networking in the HVAC industry. The conversation highlights personal experiences, challenges faced in college, and the significance of customer perception in business relationships. Throughout the discussion, they draw parallels between strength training and professional success, emphasizing the need for discipline and resilience in both fields. Eric Johnson and Matt Strong delve into the critical aspects of communication, training, and collaboration in the technical and engineering fields. They discuss the importance of effective communication for technicians, the challenges faced during boiler startups, and the need for empathy between engineers and technicians. The conversation highlights the significance of community and networking in the engineering profession, as well as common pitfalls in steam systems that can lead to costly mistakes. Overall, the discussion emphasizes the need for continuous learning, collaboration, and understanding in order to improve outcomes in the industry.

Episode Transcript

Matt D Strong (00:01.255)
Dude, it's going well, man. I appreciate the invite on here. This is cool.

Eric Johnson (00:05.72)
There's a, I don't know how much you follow on LinkedIn or, I mean, I've seen you, I like your stuff, but this is the opposite of professional. So I've had some people get like real nervous, think it's like a big interviews. Like, no, we're just here to chit chat. And yeah, I don't know if you listen to any other guests, but just a casual conversation.

and hear about your work experiences, spoilers, whatever else you do, how you got into engineering, all the likes of that.

Matt D Strong (00:38.759)
Sure, no, no pressure on my end. I actually hosted a podcast for a little bit, a powerlifting one up here in Maine for a couple years and it'd be the same thing. People would get all tense and it's like, dude, we're just talking. Most people after the first five or so minutes, once they get used to hearing themselves in the headphones, tend to calm down and chill out.

But no man, I'm looking forward to the conversation. I will admit I have not listened to any of your other podcasts, but I've been following you on LinkedIn for a while. Quite some time, so.

Eric Johnson (01:11.96)
But that's totally fine. make the podcast not expecting anybody to listen, which is crazy to some people, but it's almost like what you kind of have to do because if you think about it, how many podcasts are out there and how many videos are out there and how much attention is out there. It's like, like, do I really deserve somebody to take an hour out of their day to listen to me ramble about boilers? And no, like

I don't deserve that. If somebody wants to do that, I would love for somebody to listen. But I think there's this like entitlement of, just cause I made this video or just cause I made this podcast, people need to listen to it. It doesn't make it valuable, but I try to make these as valuable as possible. I also, early on in the podcast, I stated multiple times that I started this podcast to get better at communication. And if people listen to it, great. If people don't listen to it, great too.

The outcome, I can't change. I'm not Joe Rogan. I can't put millions of dollars behind this thing. I don't care that much. So how do you get into powerlifting? That's a little unique for engineers to be into powerlifting.

Matt D Strong (02:29.753)
It is for sure. There was a period of time where I thought that I wanted to be the strongest powerlifting engineer there is. And then I found out there's a guy named Blaine Sumner, who's literally one of the best in the world. And he's a chemical engineer, squatted like 1100, bench in the eight hundreds. But I got into powerlifting and engineering about the same time and that was college. I didn't really have, I had zero background in either of them until I got to the University of Maine.

The weightlifting was, I was in the dorm room across from the rec center. So I saw everybody going in and out and obviously with that there are some attractive females. So me and my buddy were like, we should probably hit the gym. And I remember going down there and I was, I'd never been in a weight room before other than what was mandatory in gym class, do a lat pull down and do some pull ups, leg press, whatever.

But I remember seeing a kid that looked about my size, someone that I would compare myself to, and he went and grabbed the 50 pound dumbbells and started doing incline dumbbell press, and I could barely do it with the 30s, and that's all it took. I got so many Matt weak jokes when I was a kid that it was like, all right, this is the time. So that pretty much just lit a fire under my ass, and I've been lifting ever since.

I didn't get into powerlifting until I was out of college, actually got into the competition side of things. But for me, it was always just get stronger. If I can lift heavier dumbbells than the next guy, then I'm doing good. And basically, strength is the goal. Everything else is a byproduct of it. the...

and not to go on too much of a tangent, but there's such an insane analogy between lifting weights and running a business or really doing anything in your life as far as just creating a podcast, right? It's showing up when you don't wanna show up, doing the work when you don't wanna do the work, and basically compounding that over time. You could make an analogy with investing, you could make an analogy with your professional life.

Matt D Strong (04:37.814)
Yeah, the gym has just kind of been for the last, you know, 20 or so years of my life, just kind of a huge part of the foundation of what I do.

Eric Johnson (04:48.322)
Yeah, that's a big thing. wise is, fitness is one of the few things that you cannot buy. You can use money to help you, if you could buy fitness, you would see all the Hollywood celebrities have six packs, but you'll see somebody like Chris Pratt get a six pack for a movie, and then three months later, he'll have a beer gut.

So it's like, well, you know, they have all the money in the world. have chefs, they have trainers, but if they don't have the discipline in the routine, like it doesn't, it doesn't stick with you in powerlifting. Yeah. It's something you can't just say, I'm going to be a powerlifter. And then next week you spend 50 grand and you're a world championship powerlifter. Now you're competing against people who've lifted weights in their basement. That's unheated or super hot in the summer and done that for 10 years. And then, yeah, that's.

Like it just takes grit. Same thing with business. You own your own business. But I want to go back to the college thing because college is a hot topic these days. When you went to high school or when you were a sophomore or junior, was not going to college ever a question or was it just automatic, I have to go to college?

Matt D Strong (05:47.654)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (06:01.659)
Well, I think of the because I was going into I graduated high school 2009. I think at that time it was kind of like just expected unless you were planning to go into the military or you were in vocational school already and were planning to like roll into a trade. I was not a good student, though, by any stretch of the imagination. I.

There were definitely times I worked at a lobster pound when I was growing up and I made really good money because I live in Maine and it's the biggest industry we have. I knew the owners of the company and there was me and another young guy that worked there and they wanted us to take over the company. So when we told them we were going to college, you you kind of get the, they were completely bootstrapped. Like they've got their GEDs and worked up to...

The lobster pound that I worked at was the biggest exporter of Maine lobsters to China for a long period of time. So they had bootstrapped themselves up to, you know, multi-millionaires and they were kind of like, you guys are going to be the college kids too good for us, you know. But when I applied because I was so bad in high school, I basically only got accepted into the university of Maine. And I'm really glad that I did, but I applied to the UMaine or no.

Champlain College in Vermont. And then I can't remember the name of it, but I actually applied to a photography school. Photography was like a, you know, I don't want to say a passion, but a hobby of mine. And I was trying to think of, you know, other cool things I could do with my, my life, but only got accepted into University of Maine. They'll basically accept anybody that can fog a mirror and graduate high school. But I got accepted in basically I was in the foundations program or something like that, which is a nice way to say,

academic probation off the bat. And I remember, I'm gonna maybe anticipate your next question on why engineering, because I didn't know what engineering was until probably two years into studying engineering. But I remember being again at UMaine early on in early fall, campus is beautiful. And there were these guys and gals on these like crazy

Matt D Strong (08:15.047)
homemade bicycles. Like it was like an elliptical bicycle and like almost like a pump bicycle like you'd see on like a train track. And I was like, what is this? This is interesting. And somebody goes, those are, that's the mechanical engineering school. So I went to my advisor and told them I either wanted to do parks and recreation with the goal of the parks and rec major. You can be a game warden. So that sent, that seemed pretty cool. Again, kind of stemming off of the lobster Saturday industry. worked with game wardens often.

finance, which I don't know why I picked that one. And then the third one was mechanical engineering. And when I said that he almost stopped me short and was like, look, man, nobody has ever started in foundations and graduated with mechanic with a with any engineering degree, nevermind mechanical. And that was all I needed to hear. Challenge accepted.

Eric Johnson (09:07.69)
Yeah, that's, you know, I always tell people don't join the engineering program because of all the women that are there because you'll be.

Matt D Strong (09:17.39)
No, there was definitely, I don't know if this is appropriate to say or not, but you know there was...

good looking girls and then there was the good looking for the engineering department and there was that was a very variable scale there. But no, it is funny because the same, you know, four, maybe six chicks that were in the mechanical engineering program. I mean, by the time by the time you're at the end of the program, you're pretty tight with everybody because there's, know, it starts off with 100 and it kind of ends with 30 or so people and you basically have all of your core classes with them.

Eric Johnson (09:48.579)
Yeah, that's a lot of people hate on college just because it's easy to hate on and it's a binary conversation. But it's really how do we get education as Americans and college is still the easiest, safest path. Even if you're like, I'm going to be 75 grand in debt at the end of it. That doesn't matter when you're 17 or 18, looking around and all your friends, they're all going to college and.

75 grand in debt is five four years away. You're like, know, like what is like that doesn't mean anything, you know, it's it's Right now is when I'm making the decision and that's where I think a lot of the trades they they just think it's this just easy thing to just make a decision, but like it's kind of hard to get into the trades unless you know somebody that's already in it and And then there's a lot of companies that don't treat their workers very well. So like college is very

I think a lot of the trades people hate on it, once again, it is necessary, especially for engineering. So you got mechanical engineering degree and then you, did you have an internship or like, know, so like mechanical engineering is basically like, you know, that's a super general, like there's not like a, I go into this sector or that sector. Like you could basically do anything with that. Like how did you get into?

Matt D Strong (10:56.657)
Yep.

Eric Johnson (11:16.556)
mechanical like HVAC systems.

Matt D Strong (11:19.175)
for I had one internship during college that was at a manufacturing facility and that experience alone was enough to let me know that that is not what I want to do. know, spending all summer working on SolidWorks, working on a part that was literally that would fit in the palm of your hand. They were RF radio frequency wave guide company. So it's super niche. I couldn't explain what I was doing to any of my friends or anything like that. That internship was

the first job I ever had in the teens dollars per hour 1475 I'll never forget that I thought I was killing it as a I think I was a junior in college I did a victory lap so I five years because I started off in academic probation

But I went to the job fair at the University of Maine, and I bumped into these guys at Harriman Associates. Harriman's a huge, I think it's the oldest architecture and engineering firm in the state of Maine, one of the oldest in the country. It's over 150 years old.

met these two guys, John Tarr, who was an electrical engineer, and Rick Miles, who was the head of the mechanical department, shook their hands, told them, my quick story. you know, this was around, this was the last semester of my senior year and, you know, applied for the job. And I remember sitting in,

God, it wasn't anthropology. was the study of rocks, geology, not geography, but geology. was in geology, which was my last like general electric, general elective class that I had to have. Because when you go to a university, you got to do all the general crap, you know, art of listening to music. I tend to take a philosophy class, all of that stuff. And I was sitting in that class and I got the offer letter from Harriman Associates. I think I'm pretty sure that it was about fifty four thousand a year.

Matt D Strong (13:20.153)
which I was ecstatic for. And it went from there but I remember you know on day one trying to size ductwork based on velocity and calculating it out by hand and they go no no no here's a ductilator what the hell are you doing and

Yeah, so that's where it started. I didn't really have much of a background in HVAC. I knew what CFM and GPM were from my fluid mechanics and my heat transfer classes and stuff. to me, most of what they teach you in engineering college is the super foundation, obviously, of how everything else works. So you're learning about the refrigeration cycles and steam turbines, where a turbine is just a box with a T in it.

And the interesting thing to me was I had a one of my professors was the professor of the HVAC class, which was a optional, you know, an elect an engineering elective that I never took. But my senior project was involved. It was actually we added a subcooling coil to a heat pump like just a regular wall hung heat pump. We, you know, cut into the circuit or to the piping, the piping system, put another micro channel coil with a fan on it.

So I had like a little bit of kind of experience on that side of things working with this guy Jim Labreck who is like a basically could be described as a mad scientist. He just recently invented a

What the hell is it? It's a cooling system for supermarket refrigeration that these package systems. I can't remember the gist of it. I don't do much like that, but he was kind of our mentor or, you know, guide or whatever for this. And he took us into a mechanical room in Boardman Hall, which was the big engineering.

Matt D Strong (15:13.499)
you know, lecture hall area at you mean, and I remember him asking the professor, what's that? What's that pointing at a pump, pointing at a chiller, pointing at an air compressor and the professor didn't know anything. And that was extremely shocking to me. It's like, well, these guys know it in principle, but you take, you take them into the field, which is literally two stories above them. And one, they couldn't care less. And two, they, they were kind of clueless about it.

But so yeah, that's how I got into HVAC. My first job was at Harriman Associates and my first ever project was a boiler job too. So that was very cool. Kind of ignited the passion for hydronics and boiler systems, but.

there was a housing complex on site at University of New Hampshire that they were planning to demo in the next 10 years or so. So we had to decouple it from their central system and put in two dedicated boilers. It was not a straightforward project at all, but it was great because it had primary, secondary, tertiary pumping in it.

And of course it's in a basement with no as-built or real plan. So we were literally putting put a piece of tape on one piece of the pipe, put a piece of tape on the other piece of pipe and just trace it out. It took what seems like, know, ages to get that system correct. But yeah, that was my very first job at the University of New Hampshire. First project.

Eric Johnson (16:48.738)
You said a lot there, but I want to go back and emphasize one of the biggest things I heard, if I heard this correctly is you got into HVAC industry because of a job fair and a handshake. that correct? So that is the emphasis on.

Matt D Strong (16:54.225)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (17:02.503)
Yep, that's 100 % correct.

Eric Johnson (17:07.672)
the employers who poo poo on job fairs and say they don't hire anybody from them, at the minimum, you tell somebody about the HVAC industry and the opportunities of it. And while somebody may not hire into you, know, a lot of college grads are just looking for the coolest opportunity, not really their best career opportunity after college. And...

If their first job doesn't work out and they go hey, maybe I'll go go to this other company or go to this other industry that I like so job fairs got getting out shaking hands with college kids and Even mechanical engineers you would think that they know all about HVAC But it's a it's a hidden market and there's so there's so many job opportunities out there that You got to be super loud and super proud about what you do. You can't assume that even mechanical engineering students know

who you are and what you're doing. So that's awesome that you got into that. love Boilers, obviously, for a first job. Now, so that was your first job. How'd you now end up at, you can plug your company, how'd you start your company?

Matt D Strong (18:20.391)
Sure, so this is a bit of a long-winded story here, but so I was at Harriman Associates for about six years. Easily the best boss that I have ever had throughout my entire working career was there, Dave Story. He taught me a ton.

But when COVID hit, we were an A &E firm, so under one roof. And there was a lot of kind of magic to that where I'd work up my plans for the boiler room, go hit the electrical guys, go hit the structural guys, go to the architect and just work my way around the office. And that's how you would coordinate a project. COVID hit and it completely screwed everything up because now every one of those, what would be a tap on the shoulder, five minute conversation, know, the 460 volt, 50 horsepower pumps, we're gonna put a 24 inch hole here.

let me know if we got to move it. we tell the architect we got to make the doors bigger and the boiler room bigger, which they always love. the, yeah, COVID hit and things got weird in the company. The president retired who was also a mechanical engineer. And I wanted to be a little bit closer to where the rubber hit the road. So I left and started working for a mom and pops HVAC shop, HVAC services out of Westbrook, Maine.

These guys, mean, the owner of the company's nickname is Rooftop Robbie. I think I did 80 rooftops in one year with them. They also had a sheet metal shop and we would just blow the doors off the competition. So this was also my first taste of business where I'm actually assisting in not only designing the projects, but getting the projects. And it was not a, it kind of set me up for, my next jump was tough because we, don't think

I ever lost a project unless like I never lost to anybody else sometimes the jobs would just fizzle out or people wouldn't really have the money that they said they did but it was it was an amazing place to work with they helped start my they were my first customer when I started my business which I'll get to but I worked for I worked with them for about two years again it was an absolutely killer company to work for but the engineering was so light it just wasn't that stimulating and I basically had this thought

Matt D Strong (20:37.231)
of you know could sit in my office and draw rectangles and single line ductwork and make a hundred thousand bucks a year and be pretty comfortable but I just wanted a little bit more so I jumped into sales and was the Cleaver Brooks rep in Maine for another two years working for Blake Thermal.

I was hired and they were like, this is the nerd that's not going to be able to sell anything. And when I left, I was number two in the company. Um, I mean, I sold tons and tons of the clear fire condensing boilers. had a couple million dollar POS, which was awesome. I sold a big system to Pratt and Whitney, a couple of hospitals. I did get my first six months. I sold a 600 PSI water tube boiler for a process up in Northern Maine, which was very cool. Um,

was what you know, Cleaver Brooks basically gave me a extra discount so I could win the project, you know, better multiplier. And when I told the guy I got it, he couldn't believe it because you know, I had been there six months and I'm tracking them down. He's like, yeah, whatever, go in it, you know, a point six instead of a point seven. And I'm like, hey, I got it. And they were like, holy crap. That was a very difficult project. Water tubes are super complicated. But while I was working as a sales guy,

I was still moonlighting for HVAC services because they didn't have a PE on staff. The sales company was totally cool with this. There was like no real conflict of interest because it's rooftops versus multiple million BTU heating systems. And I was working on a job with HVAC services that was with a larger contractor and it was at a larger building in Portland, Maine. And I said, you know what? I should get an LLC just to protect myself.

The quick sidebar, I had gotten sued by a real estate agent for things we won't talk about. And so I was working with a lawyer already and had reached out to the lawyer for something to start the LLC, got a auto reply, you I'm out of the office, please reach out to this person. The person that happened to be the paralegal for the lawyer I was working with was one of my babysitters when I was a kid.

Matt D Strong (22:51.887)
So I called her up and was like, Tamsin, is this you? And she's like, it has to be. And so we caught up for a minute. And I'm like, I'm looking to start an LLC. I'm going to try for the American engineering company. It's probably not available. But I'd like to start with that. And she goes, sounds good. Next thing you know, I get something in the mail with an EIN and I am the owner of the American engineering company. So I actually had started my company before I left Blake thermal.

And after some, you know, negotiations on compensation that we also won't get into at Blake Thermal I decided, you know what? I'm going to be in charge of my own destiny here and go off on my own. it was.

It obviously was risky, but I had been not super happy with my career and my day to day activities and the people that I was working with. And it really seemed like I got to get out of this. And if I end up going to work for somebody else or going back to another engineering firm or going to a different sales company, at least I tried.

I won't look back and think, you know, what would have happened if I had started the American Engineering Company. So I gave it a go and yeah, that was like 19 months ago and I've been rock and rolling ever since.

Eric Johnson (24:06.866)
Yeah, I'm surprised you got that. The American Engineering Company, that's like a 1880s engineering company name. Everything used to be like American Bench, the American Car Factory. When I saw the name, was like, I know this guy hasn't had this for hundreds of years. How is that name not taken?

Matt D Strong (24:16.185)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (24:28.337)
Yeah.

Dude, that was like the first joke and I had a, one of my buddies who is a lifter and a HVAC technician, his girlfriend does graphic design and she whipped up this logo, which people love, the American engineering logo. It's kind of like the, again, kind of like the classical American style. It's kind of timeless.

But no, dude, I got super lucky on that. I wanted to start with an A, and I didn't want anything of my name, my name or last name in there, because I've heard that's just bad luck.

So yeah, went with the American Engineering Company and I got it, which again, I think that there is like the American Engineering Consultants and American, there's a couple that are really close. I think there's also just American Engineers Incorporated, but I got the American Engineering Company. So it's, you know, minor, but I got it.

Eric Johnson (25:33.336)
And that's if you want to look it up, americanengineering.co, C-O.

Matt D Strong (25:37.627)
Yes, and that was one of my, decided, you know, I had to kind of make a quick decision. Do you want, you know, theamericanengineeringcompany.com or americanengineering.co? And I'm like, that's a little bit more eloquent, but every single time I email somebody or give my email to somebody for the first time, it's .co, it's not .com. Somebody else has americanengineering.com. And if there's a Matt at americanengineering.com, they've got a lot of emails that were supposed to go to me.

But yes, thank you for the plug. Yeah, americanengineering.co is my website. And not a ton of information on there, to be completely honest. There is a way to get a hold of me. Definitely the best way to get a hold of me is the way that you got a hold of me, which is through LinkedIn.

Eric Johnson (26:24.832)
Yeah, going back to starting a business, so yeah, you basically mentioned the, like basically the worst case scenario and you realize it is, if I fail, I just tuck my tail between my legs and just go get another job. Like that's not actually that bad of like a worst case scenario of like.

Matt D Strong (26:29.915)
Yes.

Matt D Strong (26:46.897)
Right.

Eric Johnson (26:53.91)
starting your own company, but also starting your own company. There's a lot of, it's a lot of glamorization. You I did it a couple of years ago, but there's a lot of glamorization around it right now. Like, did you ever, you you wanted to control your own future and that's, a lot of people want to do that and they end up starting their own company. But I mean, did you ever dream of having your own company or did it just kind of process into that?

Matt D Strong (27:21.229)
No, for the longest time I was very adamant that I never would start my own company. When I worked for the seafood place, the lobster pound, they decided to start a food truck when the food truck boom happened. And young guy gets to run the food truck. So I almost had like a crash course in entrepreneurship for this. Like they had me start the Twitter account. I went to all of these fairs and festivals and dealt with carnies, which was a terrible summer.

But after that, I was like, I will never work for myself. Which is very funny that I landed on where I'm at here today.

So no, was never my, my taste of entrepreneurship in a, you know, market that I did it under, I guess, you know, you'd think how complicated is selling a lobster roll, you know, but, there's the logistics of all of it and, know, getting also seeing the big, and you see this in every business, right? Is you have the passion of the owner compared to the passion of the employee and you will, the owner will always be orders of magnitude more passionate than the employee is.

force that the other way unless you give them some ownership. But so no I was I was very much much against it until yeah I was kind of at that breaking point.

Eric Johnson (28:43.022)
All right, yeah, that's kinda how I started. I got some wise advice from somebody else that basically says until you're thinking about it every night for three months, don't start your own company. And a lot of people are just vastly unprepared. But there's a whole, I could talk about that for three hours, but I wanna get into, so you start your own company.

And you're like, all right, now what? Like, how do you go out and get your first customer? And you said your first customer was a previous employer.

Matt D Strong (29:19.439)
Yeah, so my first customer was the previous employer, HVAC services. And it was very simple projects, bank, air conditioning systems, Starbucks, stuff like that. Projects you could bang out in a day.

But then it was, I will admit that I got extremely lucky where I had basically got in a cold email from this guy, Blake Peebles, who is a work for FW web. He's one of the GMs and I don't even remember what it was for, but I was in that, you know, I was probably on week six of thinking about it every day. And I just hit him up. said, would you guys benefit from having, you know, kind of an engineer on call? And he goes, absolutely. would. And I have a friend of mine.

who just started his own construction company that also could benefit from it. So I got, I went from one customer to three customers and one LinkedIn DM, which was incredible. And so FWWeb, who is a distributor ended up being, I have retainer, what I call a retainer, but it's basically a flat rate recurring engineering fee to help them develop projects, which then turn into the larger jobs. So FWWeb was the first company I had,

on the hook for one of those.

And then the other company was my buddy Steve Adams. And it's funny because I'm great friends with these guys now. He had started a he he was a former customer of mine at Johnson and Jordan, which is the biggest mechanical contractor in the state of Maine. And they decided that they weren't going to do government work anymore because of the pay cycles. And if you've ever worked for the government, you know why you wouldn't want to do it. But it was kind of my buddy Steve's baby. He had grown that business. And he said, I'd like to continue this.

Matt D Strong (31:09.065)
Would there be any grievances if I basically took those clients and they said no? So he broke off, started Facility Services USA, and he was the first person to ever pay me. And he was extremely generous about it because I had worked up a, you know,

proposal to do a design of a rooftop unit system for a police station at a VA hospital. And I sent him the proposal and he goes, you've got to get paid, right? He sent me an invoice. I haven't done anything yet. So I was very lucky to have some, you know, generous people that were also kind of bootstrapping their own businesses and we've, we've helped each other out. And he's, he's somebody that I've done a ton of business with and looking at, you know, other business ventures with.

Matt D Strong (31:59.905)
But I forgot what the original question was and now I think I'm rambling. I'm sorry.

Eric Johnson (32:04.344)
No, I have no idea what it was basically talking about first customers.

Matt D Strong (32:09.311)
yes, and getting those first customers, right. So at the very beginning, I was coming off of the sales role and I like almost my weeks didn't change, but I went from selling Cleaver Brooks to selling my own services. So I'm calling the same people. I've got the same phone number, which was super helpful. So people knew who I was. but I just traded myself like a, like a sales guy, you know, just selling engineering instead of selling.

know, boilers and steam traps and venting and stuff. But my whole pitch was to mechanical contractors. I started with mechanical contractors who didn't have on-staff PEs and basically told them like, look, instead of paying $100,000 a year and giving me four weeks of vacation and a comprehensive healthcare package, just call me when you need me. I'll get paid more than another engineer would and it will cost you less money.

So that was kind of my my grand slam offer for them And it worked out great. I mean I had I think it was the I could tell you proposal number Three was for an 800 horsepower high-pressure steam boiler plant

from an existing customer that I had been working with. yeah, that was, I had a whole bunch of thousand dollar proposals, $5,000 proposals. And then, and I think that this was, I think they still got a killer deal on this, but I did their whole steam plant design for 27,000. And that was my biggest PO by a long shot at that point, obviously.

So yeah, that's how it started, man. just treated like any other sales, any other sales business, you you call people, you qualify them and you make them an offer.

Eric Johnson (34:01.145)
of the hardest things about business is not selling out of your own pocket. So when you're sending a $27,000 PO, you're like, man, like shoot. But then there's firms out there that will send 75 grand bills or whatever. And they're like, like 75 grand. We run through that in like three hours. That's our overhead. And you're like, man, look at all this. that's.

That's so much work for me, but it's a hard thing to overcome as a business owner, because you know exactly what you're making or not making from it. And you're like, man, am I ripping them off or whatnot? But I listen to a podcast.

a guy I mean you made a reference you may know him Alex Hormozi and and You know he was talking about how Verizon charges people $80 a month for a service that costs them about a penny and you know that's really changed my perspective of Services of like you know a lot of people will say like you know I just it's what what my cost is plus 10 or 20 percent and you end up with a cash-strapped company

Matt D Strong (34:52.425)
yeah.

Eric Johnson (35:17.088)
and you can never grow because one bad event or one little bump in the road and you're out of cash and cash is oxygen for any startup. So you gotta price your services versus, you price them for the actual problem that they solve and not what you.

what it actually costs you. Because it's essentially like your labor's free. If you spend an hour on a computer doing a design or something, nobody comes and says, all right, give me 100 bucks, give me 100 bucks. But at the end of the day, you still have bills to pay and you use some overhead. But your engineering services, you can do it cheaper. And that's how I like how you said that. And I think we're kind of more fractionalizing the American economy in that.

Matt D Strong (35:55.344)
Right.

Eric Johnson (36:11.04)
Instead of a company hiring an engineer for a hundred grand, and I would say that even a hundred grand, you're probably getting a bad engineer. Like a good mechanical engineer, you're looking at even 150 plus benefits. You're easy in the 200 range of full compensation, you know, and all that time off. And if you're, and if you're not utilizing them, like at a hundred percent, then it's just.

Matt D Strong (36:19.687)
All right, entry level at that point.

Eric Johnson (36:37.006)
tons of overhead sitting on staff that's dragging down the whole company, whereas they can call you and say, hey, we need an engineer on demand and get the engineering services that are reliable. Hopefully you do good work. then, yeah, it costs a bigger percentage of the actual work, but in the long run, unless they get to 100 % utilization of you.

in the long run, it saves them money. So while they may only spend 40 grand on engineering and that would have cost them 20 grand, if they were to just hire somebody, they would have had to make up the extra and get to that full salary of 150 to 200 grand. So it totally makes sense. that's, I think there's a lot of heavy companies, top heavy companies out there right now in the mechanical space that...

You know, that's why it's so easy for like a HVAC service technician to kind of go out on their own not that it's easy I want to say like it is very difficult like being good at fixing Boilers or fixed fixing rooftop units is very different than being good at running a business But is they essentially are the business but they're going on fixing a rooftop you're paying for Jody as the secretary and the project manager and the company owner and all that overhead and then

Matt D Strong (37:55.623)
All right, the dispatcher, the truck, everything else.

Eric Johnson (37:58.575)
Yeah, so the company's charging $230 an hour for you to go out there and then they pay you a 40 and they act like they're giving you a mansion when they're paying you 40. And you're like, man, where's all this extra money going? And it's going to all that overhead, to profit, for all the mistakes. I understand you got to make money and everything, but there is so much benefit when you're not having 100 % utilization for services like that. so I guess...

You got your couple first clients, couple first jobs. Is that an avenue? Is that like your Maine offer of, hey, bring me in when you need an engineer. I can be available. And, you know, essentially you just have an expert on call engineer. Is that what your Maine core offer is?

Matt D Strong (38:48.027)
That, yeah, that I would say yes. I also went around and reached out to some people that I knew at like really large engineering firms and basically just said any of your overflow work, if you have a small project for a big client that you still got to do and execute in a timely manner, I'd love to help you guys out. I've gotten some good work from that. I also, and this is unique,

because my phone number never changed when I went from sales to owning my own company. And I would have people reaching out to me talking about quotes from the past or whatever it may be. And I got a call on a Thursday night from a fabricator that I do a ton of work with. And he was absolutely panicked. He was doing a repair on an underground, some hot water lines at a college that has a pressurized hot water system, 290 degrees.

And they had two expansion joints, know, bellow style expansion joints that were leaking. And he's like, I cannot get anyone to call me back. And it's a Thursday afternoon. I'm going to have a guy in this ditch all weekend. If we can't find something.

It just so happened that on another project I was working on, was working with a rep for Metroflex and said, I know exactly where to find these. I made the call. had, there were two that were in stock in Chicago, called the fabricator back. goes, buy those, mark them up, anything you want and let me know when they're on the truck.

So I think it was 9,000 bucks cost. I sold it to him for like 13, five and he goes, yup, sounds good. Release it, put it on a truck. So I'm fired up because I just made $4,000 in 45 minutes. And I looked at my bank account and I had like 9,800 bucks in my business checking account. I'm like, that's enough. We're gonna roll the dice here. And so I called the guy up and I'm like, hey man, I'm gonna put this on my debit card.

Matt D Strong (40:47.439)
And he goes, there's no way you can put this on your debit card, dude. You're to get nailed on the processing fee. He goes, and I'm like, damn it, I'm, I'm screwed here. And he goes, and this, I will never forget this. And he goes,

I could give you a $10,000 line of credit. And I was like, are you just, just for asking? And he goes, yup. He goes, send me an email with a PO and the shipping address and it'll be on a truck tonight. And so I did that. I, I got it out. We, the expansion joints were delivered Friday afternoon, installed on Saturday. And by the, they were completely installed by the time anybody even called us back or called the other fabricator back, which was really cool. And I, I set it up so that I had,

I had net 30 payment terms with the supplier Metroflex and I had net 15 payment terms with my fabricator buddy. So I never even had to be the bank. I got the check from Nate who was the fabricator. I went to the bank, deposited it, had a bank check cut out for exactly the amount that was needed and hand delivered it to the guy at Metroflex and was like, so why did you just give me a $10,000 line of credit? Because as an LLC owner, I can't get a line of credit to buy

I couldn't finance a burrito if I wanted to. Like I have zero proof of income. And he looked at me and this is a guy I had worked with but had never met in real life before. And he goes, you started a new company and your reputation is online. And I knew you'd pet. And so I've probably done...

50 or $60,000 worth of business in that same avenue. And I've deemed it engineered equipment procurement services. So basically helping people find something that needs like just a little bit of engineering to get right, heating coil, expansion joint, steam traps, stuff like that that you can't just call, know, FW web, grain or Ferguson, and I need a four inch butterfly valve, like stuff that's a little bit harder than that.

Matt D Strong (42:46.917)
So yeah, I got into that and then it was basically just kind of wash, rinse, repeat, gaining more and more customers over time. And then the word gets out that I'm available. yeah, man, it went pretty quickly from like having a full blown panic attack on my.

like right there behind me lying on the floor because I ran out of work in the middle of the summer. My first, know, I started my company in May 24. It probably July or August and I'd like, you know, near heart attack level of stress to, you know, now I've and this isn't necessarily a brag, but since the 4th of July, I've probably taken like four days off fully. I'm slammed man. And I wouldn't have it. I would like to get to a point where my,

days aren't quite as long but you it's you you make you make hay while the sun's shining so another Hormozi thing I'm a big fan of Alex Hermosy I actually flew out to Vegas and I've been to acquisition.com's I went to their scaling workshop and everything but a thing that he talks about is you know thinking about work-life balance at a macro setting so everybody thinks of work-life balance either in like eight hours or 40 hour increments right you're either thinking about what you're doing that day and how

what percentage of your day you're giving to your work to the rest of your life, or you're thinking about it from like a week standpoint. You know, I'm working 60 hours a week and then, you know, doing this. So I'm working six days a week and I get my Sunday off. And what he talks about is, you know, really zooming out and thinking about it. Well,

During my 30s, I was able to basically create the freedom that will hopefully allow me to live a little bit more free in my 40s. So kind of having that mentality of just not being outworked and...

Matt D Strong (44:44.839)
Yeah, trying to if it's available. The only time I've really turned down projects is because it's with a contractor I do not want to work with. Or it was just a super, super weird, tricky application. I had a guy that lives on an island who wanted to design a geothermal heat pump system for his house. And, you know, I did the typical roofer thing where I gave him an egregiously high price. Honestly, that's what it would have taken for me to do it. But I'm like, you should look at

A different system is what I would recommend. But yeah, man, it's a I'm a big I hate to like even use the word motivation. But the Hormozi stuff, man, is great. Like for it's easy to kind of especially when somebody's in the limelight to there you go. I see it. It's hard to say really motivated when you're not seeing results.

Eric Johnson (45:42.352)
Yeah, so I'll read it, put my background on my screen is it's really hard to stay motivated when you're not seeing results. It's also the most important time to stay motivated because if you stop working, you'll never get the results.

Matt D Strong (45:54.353)
Exactly. Yeah, the only way to lose is to quit.

Eric Johnson (45:57.507)
Yeah, and that's kind of what I did. mean, are you married at all, kids?

Matt D Strong (46:04.249)
I am, yep, yep, married, no kids yet, wife and I are working on it. My wife is working from home, next office over. Which is why I've got all my doors closed because I talk loud and I'm on the phone all the time.

Eric Johnson (46:14.766)
All right, so.

Eric Johnson (46:20.312)
So that's actually, that can also be a superpower. A lot of people think that once you get married, you know, your life ends and you can't go out and start a business adventure. But I would actually argue that a supportive spouse is a superpower in starting a business adventure. You want somebody that when you're in the ditch of life and stressed out that they're in the ditch with you holding your hand. I mean, Alex Hormozi had that same thing, but it's, it's hard to do that because a lot of people get married and

They seek comfort and they say, hey, I'm going to quit my job and start a company. And their spouse goes, absolutely not. Like we need the money. We're not going to give up our vacation a year. We have a kid on the way. Like there's all this stuff that, and it's basically called like golden handcuffs where you get chained to a job and changed to a lifestyle. And like most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and that's not.

Matt D Strong (46:58.247)
security.

Eric Johnson (47:17.582)
because they're not making a ton of money, they just don't spend the money wisely. Like there are Americans out there that make 400 grand a year and spend 410 grand a year. And they are as broke as somebody who makes 20 grand a year and spends 21,000 a year. Like it's all about how much money you keep. yeah, that's the outwork everybody else. That's kind of how I went is.

I got out, I went to college for HVAC engineering technology, not a mechanical engineer, but we started with the ductilator day one in college and was like, hey, this is how you design duct work. This is how you design, you know, pumps. These are pump curves. So was very mechanical engineering light, but very applicable to HVAC and boilers and everything. But got out of college and just went right into like, hey, I'm single, I'm young.

If they, I was a technician for a boiler company, if they offer overtime or, hey, can you work? It's always a yes. And I've never heard anybody say, oh man, I've got so much money. I just wish I could do something else, but the money's the limiting factor. most people, it's the, they,

don't have the opportunity to make more money. A lot of people work a part-time job or something and say, oh, I only was able to work 35 hours this week. If they would offer 10 more hours, I would. So if they kept offering, it's like, well, I'll work more, I'll work more. And the amount of stuff I learned with, I did that like seven years, the amount of stuff I learned in seven years is more than a lot of people learn in their whole career. Not that I'm special or did anything, it's just.

when you, you'd be surprised at how often or how much you can learn when you're dedicated and actually like treat it as a, like a, like a mission of like, Hey, I'm going to go learn and I'm going to go do this thing. And that, I mean, that's what you got to do when you're starting a company. And I mean, you've probably seen that of, you probably get a lot of times when you say yes to things and you don't exactly know how to do something or

Eric Johnson (49:40.855)
like, I need to make a call and somebody can help me with this. But you say yes, and you're like, well, I'm going to go figure it out. And that takes a lot of guts to do that because a lot of people want to play it safe. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's creators and then there's consumers. And creation is very tiring and nothing's guaranteed, which is.

Matt D Strong (49:48.572)
Yep.

Eric Johnson (50:09.41)
very, very hard to deal with until you get the snowball effect and then everybody looks at you and you're you're so successful. You got so...

Matt D Strong (50:16.815)
Yeah, overnight success. It only took two years to do it.

Eric Johnson (50:20.174)
You got so lucky, of course everybody's calling you, but it really goes into, I mean everything I'm hearing is you had relationships and I think a lot of people in HVAC on the technician level don't value relationships because they see short term and why would I need a relationship? Well, what if you want to get into sales? What if you want to get into something else? And who are you going to call? And relationships are...

basically how business gets done, basically how you'll look and say, why is this company buying from that company? because the owners golf together. And you can say that's unfair. I have a better product than them, but that's kind of how relationships work. Like the world isn't fair. So as far as relationships go, like how, like do you have a bunch of, and you've kind of mentioned it, of like,

other very low employee or single owner companies that you use as a network to try to like help each other as far as like, hey, I know you're doing this, I'm gonna use you or you're also an engineer, I'm gonna refer you. Is that kinda happening?

Matt D Strong (51:36.999)
There seems to be like a trend in the micro firm. think lots of you know, the micro firm kind of boom I think a lot of people are going into it Very early on the first people that I were partnering that I was partnering with was plumbing engineers I'm working for these mechanical contractors and they're not bidding just the mechanical they want to do the plumbing also I Hate plumbing systems. I don't no interest in designing them It's it's nuanced it's

Every time I open up the UPC website with the noise of the page flipping it absolutely just burns my insides. But I had a project, was like a condo or yeah, condo building, apartment building, something like that. I given the contractor a quote for eight grand to do a VRF system and he sends me back a PO for 16 grand and goes, you're doing the plumbing system also. And so I found a plumbing designer and it was a guy

I used to work with and met through ASHRAE ASHRAE is an important thing to mention because it is kind of a pain in the butt to go to a bar, to whatever after work and deal with more people that you work with or in your network. Usually the last thing you wanna do when you get out of work is deal with more people that you work with. But the networking power of ASHRAE is huge because it's kind of...

It's almost like a, for lack of a better term, a good old boys club. Like if you, when you see people at the ASHRAE meetings and you've had a couple of drinks with them and you shared your war stories or whatever, you're just like, you've broken the first barrier of trust. know, like you're not a stranger to these people. So that was huge. And then obviously just made a lot of tons of contacts when I was in sales, which was the majority of the, like I had developed some relationships with other engineers

and definitely reps when I was...

Matt D Strong (53:37.127)
you know working for a contractor and working at my first company, but the Rolodex of contractors really was generated from when I was in sales And it's it was worth its weight in gold. I still have a list that I wrote I think I made it in 2020 of every engineer and contractor broken down by Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, which was like my Maine sales territory I should have mentioned this too, but reps

equipment reps have been a major source of opportunities.

because they have people that are going to them and say, I got to replace this condensate receiver. And the rep is like, we've replaced this condensate receiver four times this year. Do you think we should maybe look at what's causing the condensate receiver to fail? And I've got an engineer that could do it. know, a lot of times too, I'll send the PO to the...

I'll have my contract with the rep rather than with the end user. It kind of protects me for getting paid. But the relationship stuff, as you know, it takes a long time and

the best and this is going to sound like corny and almost like not useful information, but the best thing you can do is just the right thing. And sometimes that's telling people, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to solve this problem. I'll will figure it out, but I don't know what it is. Telling people I've, when I was selling boilers, it was, you know, we're in the electrification world and people are reaching out to me for 300 KW electric boilers. And I'm like,

Matt D Strong (55:17.355)
Guys, it's are you trying to save energy or trying to pat yourself on the back here? and Just having those really honest conversations with people doing the right thing over time Because I think that people will realize like he's you know, he's not just in it for the income

And I think obviously in the grand scheme of things, like it feels better doing the right thing always obviously than it does like getting big checks is awesome. Don't get me wrong. But when you can like truly help somebody out and

Solve the problem and especially when it was like a long existing problem. That's one of the best rewards You know, we live in a thankless world like nobody says Eric you did you did the perfect job cleaning those that boiler and punching those tubes It's exactly how it's supposed to be done. You only get the call if you're like, dude, you missed half the friggin tubes What the hell's wrong with you? You know, nobody you nobody get dude It's been 72 degrees all summer long and everyone is comfortable. You don't get those calls, you know, so anytime you get that

But it's something you've got to kind of just save in your own personal piggy bank of, you know, of wins so that you can keep moving on when you do get the crappy phone calls.

Eric Johnson (56:31.798)
Yeah, one of my profound experiences as a service technician was when I, so I'm a younger guy and I love my phone as far as like looking up information, but a customer doesn't know whether you're looking up information or whether you're scrolling social media or calling for help. And I remember.

Yeah, and this is like, I mean, I don't even remember what time period this was, but probably 2019, 2018. Still new-ish to Boilers, but I could solve enough problems. I spent a whole day at a customer site, solved all their problems, got them all working again, and they called my service manager and they're like, hey, like your tech spent all day on his phone, like you're overcharging me, like I wanna, you know.

Like he wasted a ton of time on his phone. And what I was doing on my phone was looking up manuals, making sure I was doing everything correctly. I was working on a controller that I wasn't familiar with. So looking at all the menu options and doing everything. And so I always had my phone open with me while I was doing work, but it wasn't like I was like.

You know just sit on my phone for like 45 minutes and then like oh like yeah I gotta get back to work But every time they'd come past I had my phone in my hand and that's all they remembered was not that I fixed all their problems It was well, he was here for eight hours, but I saw his phone in his hand so he must have been wasting time and you know, and it's really it's all about perception at that point of The customer saw me as a technician

wasting time on the clock, billing at whatever rate with my phone in my hand. And I saw myself being resourceful instead of saying, hey, I don't know, I can't figure this out. We're not doing it correctly. I was being resourceful and looking up manuals and looking up information and fixing their problem. And at the end of the day, the problem got fixed, but they didn't care that the problem got fixed. They only cared because they thought it could have been done faster or whatever.

Eric Johnson (58:40.494)
Perception, well, he just spent all day on his phone. every, you know, the three times they walked past the boiler room and looked in, I had my phone in my hand, so I must have had it all day. And you know, that's their only perception is the negative. And that I constantly harp about and writing is a lost art, technical writing. But you can be a superhero, but if you don't tell your customer that you were a superhero, they don't know and they don't care. All they see is a bill.

and if the bill, in the writing of the bill, you just said engineering services, and you send them a $5,000 bill, they're like, all right, what? What'd you actually do? But a lot of techs will argue, or anybody, that, well, I fixed the problem, why does it matter? Well, it's all about perception, and Kelly and accounting is five people removed, and they get the bill, and they're like, five grand.

Matt D Strong (59:16.708)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (59:35.565)
And they're like, all right, what'd we do? We had a contractor in here and they're trying to make sure that everything's all lined up. And they go to the, and the contractor sends over all the service reports and all that stuff. And they look at it and it says fixed boiler. And they're like, all right, like we need, yeah, we need some like documentation. And then it's got like three grand worth of parts on it. And it's like, okay, like what's going on here? But from the techs mind,

Matt D Strong (59:51.963)
Yeah, as necessary. Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:00:05.442)
they just think that, well, I fixed everything and did exactly what needed to be done. So why should they care what I write or don't write? But it's all about communication and perception. that's one of the biggest things about perception with engineers is that they don't know what they're doing. And they sit in an office all day and can't identify a pump out in the field, even though they design pumps, which you alluded to. And I want to get into, so I'm.

The opposite of an engineer. am not, math is not my thing. So like, first of all, like what is your core? So like I look, I'm looking at your website and you know, the few pictures you have are all of boiler rooms or boiler systems, looks like a steam system here. Is boilers your thing? I know you work for the Cleaver Rep. Is that like your bread and butter that you enjoy?

Matt D Strong (01:00:56.647)
would say that it's definitely like if I could wave a magic wand and just do boiler rooms, I would do it because I that's where I can really make good money pricing off of value versus pricing off of hourly. Right. I've done so many boiler rooms. I'm very familiar with boilers themselves because I've sold them like I am completely comfortable popping the cover off of a boiler, you know, controls and the electronics is definitely not my specialty. But when it comes down to the hardware and the heat exchanger and your gas valve,

and your burner and all that stuff like I love knowing about that stuff because what I'm talking to you know guys

like you, I kind of want them to, I want the technicians to know like, look, we're solving the same problem together. I can't, you know, if you see me walk in, I tell this to people all the time, like if you see me walk into a job site with an impact wrench, something is seriously screwed up. and if I saw Mr. Technician trying to read a pump curve, I would think what the hell's going on here, you know? So having that kind of, I think one of the big things I've tried to do is like close the bridge between

techs and engineers Like I have a lot of friends that are contractors I like talking with contractors especially a lot easier to talk with contractors and techs and you know and kind of shoot the breeze and Talk like you would to your boys and it is you know talking to the facilities director of a hospital or or of a college was you know This prestigious title

It's funny though, I wanted to just jump back on the technician side of things real quick. cause I, and you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think that especially on the tech side, like

Matt D Strong (01:02:39.335)
And technicians could be a huge variety of people. Like some technicians you meet are literally the best sales people that you possibly could be. They're the ones making the sales, not the sales person, because they're just explaining to the guy that makes the decision what they gotta do, or if you don't do it, I'm coming back and you're getting a $25,000 bill because we gotta retube your boiler or whatever it is.

But I think like a lot of the like a lot of technicians just struggle with communication and it's both internally and externally, you know, they have a hard time explaining what they need to the dispatch which causes, you know, that's part of the reason why they're built out of 240 bucks an hour but only get paid 40 bucks an hour because of the kind of, you know, sometimes some companies just have inherently built inefficiencies kind of baked into their their pricing.

But I'm curious like what your kind of comment is on that because I mean, I've worked with, like I said, a wide variety of technicians, a lot of them. And I've kind of said this to, you know, owners in the past. It's like, like, don't expect an email, a clearly written email from this guy. The reason he wanted to turn wrenches is because he didn't want to sit behind a computer. Of course, now, though, you have this funny thing where to tune that boiler, you're plugging a laptop into it. But anyways, on the

I just I don't know if I don't know if that's something that you've seen to just with like a lot of a lot of texts I think just struggle to communicate and because of that you get what you had a Lot of guys are shy a lot of guys just don't want to be bothered They want to get back on the truck and go back home, they don't want to go through They're like I fixed it without my job is to fix it my job isn't it to tell you what I did My job is to fix it So curious what your thoughts are on that

Eric Johnson (01:04:27.366)
yeah. So I'll, I'll when companies, when we talk about training, companies are always flustered with the, technical side of things and they're constantly trying to figure out, how do we get our guys or gals, up to speed on technical stuff? And I'm like, screw the technical.

Let's not worry about that. When's the last time you did communication training? When's the last time you did greeting training? When's the last time, do your technicians or people know how to greet somebody, how to look somebody in the eye, how to shake their hand, how to overcome objections, how to respond when somebody gets angry, how to do all this? And writing it down in a handbook is not good enough.

It's like you actually have to role play it and like just like you wouldn't like a sales or like for door knocking of like, Hey, like we're going to have 10 angry customers and you need to work through all of them as a technician. And, I know very, very few to know companies that actually do that. Everybody is just, well, they're technicians. We just need technical training, but actually the best technicians are the ones that communicate best and

Once again, it goes back to customer perception. If the customer likes you and they think the technician is competent because they're a good communicator, the customer will keep calling them or at least that customer contact will keep calling for that technician and they don't really care what the bill is or if they're the fastest, but they like them as a person because they are a good communicator and they think that they're doing a good job. It doesn't actually mean that they may be doing a good job, but they also may not be doing a great job.

But I've seen lots of technicians do terrible jobs but be buds with the facilities person because they're a great communicator. And they may spend two days on a job that would take me three hours, but the facilities person really doesn't care because they're a great communicator and they make it seem like they're doing a great work. And I can't argue with that really. It is what it is. The world's not perfect.

Eric Johnson (01:06:37.742)
But yes, communication, the people that are drawn to being technician are not communicators, but also, I like to look back at like older times of pre-internet, and I would say like I can look up service invoices and there's like two sentences of writing on it. And I think people only care now more because one, communication is instant two, the bills are.

700 % higher. So when you get a bill for $40 for a day's labor, people are like, oh, whatever. And I know $40 was more back then, but now the bills are higher. You call a company, a boiler company, and they're like, all right, it's $1,800 for a technician show up for a day, whether they're there for four hours or eight hours. And so there's so much pressure to figure out what they're doing. And really, when you think about

what a technician has to be. They have to be a master communicator, master troubleshooter. They have to be, have some knowledge about all HVAC systems, even if they work on only boilers, you have to know like, these hydronic systems, why is it going into this big box? Oh, well, that's an air handler. And if the air handler is not running, then you're not gonna have heat and then you have fans and all this stuff. So we're expecting experts to be...

well, well rounded and now have great technical ability and communication ability. And then they also probably talk to like a facilities manager, like people that are pretty high up that probably spend most of their time at a desk talking to similar people at their level and emailing. And then they get this, you know, like, I don't want to say lowly, like, but.

They get the person who may like, I just turned wrenches for a living and they come in there and their level of communication is not at that like facilities manager level and I just turned wrenches, but I just worked there three days and now I got a $10,000 bill. Like it's hard for the technician to imagine like that much money as far as like their services, like they don't self value themselves enough and.

Eric Johnson (01:09:00.078)
for like the amount of communication and like how they see their status. Cause they just see, you know, I just make 80 grand a year or whatever. But the facility is calling you the company to send an expert. They see you as an expert, whether you've been on the job a day or 30 years, you're the expert to come in to fix the problem. And I mean, it's a whole range of things, but I would say if you're a company or manager listening to this.

Screw the technical, that will come. Work on communication. is the fastest. Communication training is the fastest. Like if you spend three weeks on communication training, and that's not like just three weeks in a row, like, hey, we're gonna work on this consistently over like three weeks of emails, constant communication, all this stuff while you guys are working. The payback on that is,

way more and you can make up way more ground than, we're gonna try to teach the technician about steam and steam temperature and water and condensate and firing rate and combustion and pumps and pump curves. Yeah. like technicians are expected to be experts and like, I don't understand. I've only done boilers, burners and I feel like I know nothing. There are technicians out there that

Matt D Strong (01:10:14.575)
That's saturation curves and things that they do not care about whatsoever.

Eric Johnson (01:10:30.2)
try to do everything and they start, do rooftop units, they do air conditioning, then they'll go to chillers, they'll, heating season's here, now they're working on boilers. And then every manufacturer now has their own special control systems with printed circuit boards and all this stuff and wifi connectivity and this and that. And you're like, yeah, no wonder technicians don't know anything because like, where's the time to train on all these systems when...

you have a general mechanical sending out people to just go fix the problem. And they're supposed to be an expert on all things mechanical. Like HVAC as a whole, like those couple of letters, like that is billions and billions of dollars of industry that we just expect somebody with a couple of weeks of training to just go figure it out. And it's like, this is not an easy job. And there's a reason why.

there's a technician shortage and there's a reason why only a few percentage of people are great technicians. And then they say, they could make a hundred grand. Like a hundred grand is that much money anymore. I'm like, there's people that are sitting in an office that just bounce emails all day making a hundred grand and they don't know a tenth of what these technicians are expected to know. like, yeah, that's my, but communication training, definitely number one things that.

Companies can do day one and don't assume that your technicians have reading and writing skills and communication skills and know how to greet customers, remember names, what's the follow-up process, what's the closeout process. My biggest thing, I used to do a bunch of boiler startups and you'll probably know about this. I don't know what your role with sales was, but with a boiler startup, especially at Hydronics, and you'll know this being in the Northeast.

You walk on site and all of sudden you are the most popular person. Why? Because the mechanical contractor or the general contractor is paying for a temporary heat bill and they want to use your boilers instead of paying for a temporary heat. And the mechanical gets paid for completion and the boiler system isn't completed till start-up's done. So they are interested in the start-up person getting the boilers completed and then the plumber is to the gas and they don't get paid till the gas line is done but...

Eric Johnson (01:12:56.826)
You know and there's an all of a sudden then then the controls person is there and they're needing to control the system and now you have four or five contractors of You know, it's anywhere between five people to 15 people and you just walked on site as a startup person or as a salesperson who does the startups and you are the most popular person at a project that you probably know nothing of and You are expected to make those boilers run that day

because they think startup is just, turn on the switch and everything's good to go. And yeah, and you have to figure out, all right, do we have enough gas? Do we have the right springs in the regulators? Do we have the right pumps? Is the system pipe correctly? Was it engineered correctly? Like, do I have the proper flow for my hydraulic boiler? All right, like if we're gonna make steam, you know, the steam boiler, hey, we gotta do a boilout. Hey, that takes, you know, all day. We're not gonna have steam today. Like...

Matt D Strong (01:13:31.099)
Yep, press the big red button.

Eric Johnson (01:13:54.137)
but all these contractors are now waiting on the one startup person. And for the hydronic, most hydronic boilers, little package, especially condensing boilers, like the boiler's gonna run. Like they're pretty much all the same. It's managing all the contractors and expectations. And when the GC says, hey, when is this system gonna be running? When are we gonna have heat to the building? You have this little $35 an hour person telling this GC on this hundred million dollar project, like,

That's a huge, cause that GC might send an email, hey, the startup person said we're going to have heat at the end of the day. And now the, you know, the startup person, the tech could have been like, I don't know. I just gave him an answer. The first thing that popped to my mind, I don't know, end of the day. And it doesn't end up being the end of the day. Now the GC is like, wait, why don't we have heat? Like, and then it goes through and like I, when I was a startup person, I got copied on all these emails with people that I should have not even been involved with.

And they're just like, well, the startup tech said this, so it must be true. And it's like, whoa, whoa, like we, I just said this in passing conversation. Like I didn't mean for this to like outlook over your whole project and for you to like change contractor schedules and do all this. Like, I'm just the startup, I'm just trying to figure this out. And yeah, but I don't know if your experiences were like that as.

Matt D Strong (01:15:17.927)
Oh dude, I have so many good startup stories. Cause that was always, it was also the final like 25 % paycheck sometimes for the boiler itself. So it was a big incentive for me as a sales guy. I never actually did the startups myself because I'm not licensed gas tech. always, wanted to get my gas license because I wanted to be more useful when I was on site. Most of what I was doing was kind of being the conduit of community

between the tech so that the tech could keep working and the general contractor like I'm used to having the conflict talks with GC's it's the nature of the business these guys get all worked up and or you know could potentially get all worked up

I had a technician on a job site say, he, you know, he was working on the wrenching on the boiler and it was a, uh, I think it was a 4 million BTU condensing boiler, uh, with 40 to one turndown. So obviously tuning it is like very, very particular getting that air to fuel ratio correct and tuning the two gas valves that basically had two burners inside of it. So it's twice the amount of work, uh, and making sure that they stage correctly and you don't blow the other one out or suck the other one out when the second stage comes on. And he was getting frustrated with it and he goes,

these fucking boilers are a piece of shit. I hope it's all right that I swear on this. And the owner, one of the owners of the company happened to be walking by the boiler room and I get a phone call from the contractor that I sold it to who goes, one of your techs just told the owner that the $60,000 boiler that we installed is a piece of shit. And so that was a great, you know, lesson in communication to everybody.

Dude, the amount of times I've gone on site, we are ready to start this boiler. We're pulling out the temp heat and you get there and there's no gas. My favorite is there not being water connected to the boilers. Like it's very hard to heat water when there's no water in the boiler. Very difficult to do that. The super large or the 600 PSI water tube that I did was off of a propane system, which you can imagine is a lot of propane. And the first time that we sent

Matt D Strong (01:17:31.813)
to tech up there which is about a four hour drive from Portland Maine to Ashland Maine which is like at the very tip you know the border of Canada and they had like a thousand gallon pig out front and I'm pretty sure the pilot

sucked the gas out of the like we didn't even get close to doing a boil out on that thing you know and it was four hours up and then he was there for an hour and a half and four hours back and it was we had to kind of develop um like we would call it a pre-startup checklist as a part of the contract that says that it's got power we've got pumps we've got flow we've got a load we've got gas the gas is delivered at the right pressure uh the electrician's been there he's bumped the pumps we know that the things are rotating correctly

And if they, you know, we make them sign off on it and if they, if it wasn't up to snuff, we would have the ability to send them an invoice. But of course, now you've got a potentially a great customer. you're nickel and diamond me for another startup. And I was like, all right, well, we'll.

this one and it's a super tough balance and communication and documentation I think is the best way to solve that. If you can send me a photo of the boiler with the green light on that it has power and that you can show me a pressure gauge that shows it has water and the probably the biggest

Point of contention that I would run into on startups, and this was specific for steam boilers, is water treatment. Because oftentimes it was the responsibility of the owner. And they would say, we're ready to start this boiler up. We're ready to start our process. Like, our kilns are dying for some steam. And you have to explain to them that, like, OK, we'll do the boil out. If you don't meet the water chemistry, this boiler has no warranty.

Matt D Strong (01:19:21.567)
What? You know, and so that was always that was probably the toughest thing and I would try to, know, the first day the boiler arrives and like you're talking to your Nalcos or your Aqua Labs or whoever, right? Like are they going to can they provide the boil out compound? I can provide the boiler compound, but I'm going to mark it up 45%. Maybe you just have them do it. And if you have a relationship with them because you've got cooling towers and other stuff using water, they might be able to give you a better deal for it.

But yeah, man, startup was, like, I felt like in the boiler world, the startups during construction were less of a risk. When I was in the rooftop world, everybody would want to, you you've got an envelope, you've got a rooftop, they power the thing. We've got some, you know, rudimentary ductwork, and they want to start painting.

And the last thing you want to do is introduce all that moisture to a brand new rooftop unit. So we would also make them sign off basically saying the day that we start the unit is the day the warranty begins and everyone needs to sign off on that. And usually that that's when the owner would step in and say, no, you're to pay for your temp tube heater and we're going to start the rooftop up when the building's complete and we don't have to put media over the returns and all that stuff. But did startup is never

I've I think I've learned to manage my expectations for startups. You know, I basically especially for, you know, a larger system where you've got a cup, you know, over a million BTUs, multiple boiler systems. Like it's very rare that it gets started up started up in a day. And I try to always manage people's expectations on that and explain to them that, you know, if you've got a new Vissmann or a CI2 or you've got a clear fire in here, this is kind of like tuning a race car to a very specific racetrack, which is your hydraulic

system that's on here it's going to be a little bit different for every single boiler and it's going to be dependent on the temperature outside the actual load in the building you know fortunately

Matt D Strong (01:21:30.937)
Like a lot of times on the boilers, you know, don't even have the rest of the piping system hooked up and they want to start the boilers up so they can check that box. And it's like, all right, well, we've got some indirect tanks. We'll run the mop sink and see how close we can get to high fire before we hit high limit and shut the boiler off. But yeah, startup man is a that you want to talk about where the rubber hits the road.

I had another great one too, where I had, I was reaching out to, there was like a big boom in anaerobic digesters a couple of years ago. I don't know if it's still like booming, but you know, taking cow poop, heating it up and making clean natural gas with, you know, the fermentation process. And they would heat these tanks, these huge concrete tanks with condensing boilers. And I had a general contractor out of Vermont. He asked me for a price for a 1 million, a 2 million, a 3 million. So I gave them each one.

figure this is going absolutely nowhere and Reach back out to him and I go you figure out which size boiler you guys want and he goes Yeah, we need three one millions two two millions and four three millions and I was like this guy just became my best customer in one email but I sold them they containerized all of them, I think it was seven boilers total and When Cleaver had

You know, they kind of, they like, what's the term, like Saran wrap, the boilers for shipment, you know, and they had like over Saran wrapped it. And when you released it, it had kind of dented the panels that they under the Saran wrap and all the panels come off. I wasn't told this. So they, get on site and I just got a ginormous, I got a ginormous PO from these guys and the boilers have already, you know, been shipped. So I've already been paid for them. And they're like, you got to put the like,

We can't get these panels back on. You're the expert. And again, I'm not like, I can build basic stuff. could do basic plumbing. I can do basic electrical. I'm not a technician by any sense of the word, but I, and some on the 3 million BTU boiler, I could, it was like full wingspan of the door. And it was just one of those things where, you know, I kind of messed with it for a while and eventually like set it down, click, second click, put the entire weight of my body into it. And it,

Matt D Strong (01:23:49.521)
step back and everything was connected and I was like holy crap thank god but so yeah I've been in some some unique

you know, don't really know what you're signing up for. They basically want me to just go and I would basically make a sales trip. It would be a checkbox in the CRM and it would be the final approval to send a technician up so that we could actually start the things up. So a lot of times that, you know, basically checking on it fell on me and part of my sales responsibility of the, like they were expecting us to support the project throughout the entirety of the project, not just get the PO and move on. And now we pass this on to our inside team or whatever.

So yeah, startups are definitely a huge point of contention at times, but it's also like the most exciting. I had an owner or one of my old bosses tell me the two days an engineer should avoid being on site is rigging and startup because that's people really, that's when you're again, the most popular guy on site.

Eric Johnson (01:24:50.262)
Yeah, startup is all the sins of everybody are the boiler's fault because if the boiler is...

Matt D Strong (01:24:58.181)
Yes, it's always the piece of shit boiler doesn't work at all. It's like it has nothing to do with the takeo base mounted pumps that were installed in the 50s. it? the other, the other startup thing that was always missed on the condensing side is so engineers would always show a temperature header sensor and say BMS, right? For monitoring.

Eric Johnson (01:25:09.08)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (01:25:20.583)
Most boilers for cascade need their own temperature sensor for control. So You missed the well, what do you mean? Who's supposed to install this thing? You know, so that was probably the most popular miss was the temperature header sensor for the cascade control because then again, it's a You got to drain the system You have to get a welder or a tech back to put the well in you need to get a controls guy to put

it in there and you know an electrician to run a conduit so that you can pull the wire and then you send the technician back. Yeah that was a popular one that was missed.

Eric Johnson (01:26:01.423)
that and like, uh, boilers are different, like they'll install like drafts, controls, and then, uh, you know, you'll have wires between the boilers and the draft controls and wires between the boilers talking to each other and wires between the boilers and the like Maine control panel. If they have that and that's on nobody's prints and they're like, well, who's responsible for this? And the startup person walks in there and they're like, Hey,

where are all these wires? And everybody goes, yeah, and everybody goes, that's not on our prints. We didn't know about that. And it's, it constantly falls through the cracks and, yeah, that's, I don't know on the, on the new construction is so there's so much chaos that I don't know what the answer is for.

Matt D Strong (01:26:32.379)
Yeah, here's a big box of trim.

Eric Johnson (01:26:55.958)
not having stuff fall through the cracks. I've also seen, you said the whole, like, a lot of people have that pre-startup checklist, but to schedule a tech on site, it may be four weeks out. So they say, hey, are we going to have this checklist done by this Monday when the tech will be here? It's not done now, but are we gonna have it done in four weeks? And everybody says, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll have it done. So then they check off the whole list that it's all done, and it's gonna be done by...

that Monday, well, all this stuff goes wrong and it's not done. The tech shows up and it's like, wait, you guys, you said you had gas and they're installing the gas meter at the outside of the building. It's like, yeah, they were supposed to have that last week, but they said they'd have it done by noon today. Can you just hang around? And it's like, we didn't bid this to hang around for extra days. Like we bid this to get the project for a two day startup, not.

three days of engineering services and waiting around and telling you what you did wrong and doing all this stuff. You can lose so easily on a startup, but I wanna, since you're an engineer, I wanna take this opportunity. So how do we bridge, so engineers, how do we bridge the gap between engineers thinking that they know everything versus engineers consulting.

Maybe even technicians or somebody else like how do we train engineers specifically? How do you get an engineer to design steam systems? Well or design HVAC systems as well because there there seems to be a Gap and I don't really know what the gap is. Some people do it. Well, like I've had engineers like Do stuff that I'm like, this is blatantly wrong. I know this is wrong, but you can't tell them they're wrong and They're like no it worked out on paper. I'm like no like this. This does not work

but you have to prove it, but you're just a lowly technician and I don't care if the math works. And then they, after tons of emails and calls of why it doesn't work, they're like, yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah, let's do that, the first option. But there seems to be this gap between what engineers design versus what actually works a lot of times. And I don't know what the answer is for the education because engineers, just like technicians, are so overworked.

Eric Johnson (01:29:22.67)
that they don't have all this time for education and extracurriculars to learn about all these systems that they're trying to design. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

Matt D Strong (01:29:33.849)
Yeah, so I think for me and I could obviously speak on what's worked well for me is I think the biggest thing is getting in the field more. It's super easy to just, you I can draw a steam header with a 12 inch steam header with four, four inch pipes coming in and out in about 30 seconds, right? But when you take the drafter on site and you show him that like, look at each one of these welds and then you

get a little welder, hey, how long did it take you to do this weld for this end cap that's literally just a symbol, like half a rectangle? that was a 35 minute weld. And then you point out, and that's applied at each T, each elbow, each flange.

That I think is a big thing for, it's easy for engineers to get desensitized to failing because they, they screw up often. We, we all screw up often. And if you get too desensitized to it, it's just almost like part of business, but showing somebody that like I had a, I won't name names, but I had a inside guy at one of my previous companies, quote, an air separator instead of an air vent.

and he put in an email to me, what's the big deal? Like these are pretty close, like they kind of do the same thing. And this was for an eight inch system. You're talking about a $90 part versus a $6,000 ASME vessel that has to be rigged up. So I'm like, let me show you, come on site. And I said, I was like, you see that big yellow, it was a spiral fan. You see that big yellow flange thing up there that looks like it weighs 1200 pounds? That's the air separator.

tiny brass thing on top of it, that's the air vent and that's why I was pissed that you didn't know what the difference was. But also going on site more, talking with technicians, why are you so I drew the piping like this and you're routing it a little bit different way, what is the reason for that? I see a lot of people do that on projects and I don't know why it is and then when you find out and it's like we could share a unistrut.

Matt D Strong (01:31:43.623)
Oh, so obvious, know, or something just so many of those light bulb moments happened on site talking with the guys. Cause again, engineers need to remember that if your value of what you offer is not that valuable, if it doesn't become real, like doing a study on a boiler plant versus providing construction documents to build the boiler plant, there's a huge separation in value there. Um, hold on a second.

Matt D Strong (01:32:16.591)
I think too like.

I mentioned failing. hate to admit it, but failing is absolutely for me the best way to learn. could, you know, when I was interviewing for jobs and I'll tell, I like to tell the stories of my biggest change orders that I've ever caused. I had a $240,000 change order. That was my fault at Dartmouth college because of literally a symbol on a plan. was supposed to be combo fire smoke dampers and we just put fire dampers in and it was caught after final paint and

and had to go in and surgically install these fast acting dampers and integrate the smoke detectors in the hall. It was an absolute nightmare. But guess who became an expert on life safety dampers after that? Me. Yeah, think you really got to...

Again, like engineers can't build without, your projects are just literally a drawing without the technicians and you have to realize that. I think what the, from the opposite side that the technicians need to think of is just the.

You know, engineers are putting lines on paper all day, but that's not like the value of the engineering. It's the decision. You know, it's the decision that we're going to put 100 PSI relief valve or a 75 PSI relief valve, or that the pump's going to be at 100 feet of head versus 80 feet of head and the liability associated with that. And when you realize

Matt D Strong (01:33:43.279)
kind of the gravity of that sometimes it can be pretty, staggering, you know, and I think that, you know, engineers don't necessarily think about the headaches that they cause technicians and technicians don't think about like the headaches that were ahead of creating the plan and why we had to show the stack being 14 feet off the roof instead of six feet off the roof, because we thought that we might be close to an air intake or, whatever it may be.

But it's like, and this is that that was kind of my specific option or my specific answer to your question, but my like 30,000 foot philosophical answer would be, you know, communication and not enthalpy. What the hell am I trying to say here? What's the word? Not enthalpy, but. It's the you know what I'm trying to say, what's the word?

Eric Johnson (01:34:32.586)
and yeah

Matt D Strong (01:34:39.119)
Empathy, empathy, empathy. Yes, like you, like at the end, most people, you know, for lack of a better term and part of my friends, but most people do give a fuck and you need to, and there are people that won't and just stay the hell away from those people. But when you find the people that do figure out what they care about, let them know what you care about, figure out how you guys can help each other. And that is how you get absolutely killer design build projects.

Eric Johnson (01:34:39.454)
I like the empathy, yeah.

Matt D Strong (01:35:08.527)
where that's where you can really save some money. Especially when you know who you're working with and you know, like there were some contractors I could put a rectangle for the boiler, connect the return, connect supply, and I know it would come out perfect. There are other people for that same project that have to basically model in 3D with the hangers shown and every single valve, et cetera, because I know, you know, their strength might be more on the duct work side than on the piping side or vice versa.

So really just going in the field and really caring about beyond the floor plans or whatever, what is the actual outcome that you're getting? What did you do wrong? What were the things? If you do three projects and there's an issue on...

Condensate neutralizers or condensate drainage on all three of them you figure out what you're doing wrong and talk with the text and have a little you know

Humility to and say guys I obviously am NOT doing something right here Can you show me how you guys would pipe this up that right there if you say that as an engineer the guy stamping the plans to attack It's gonna let their guard down and then I think that is and I mean that in a good way let their guard down because now they can just feel like they could freely communicate with you so And then that's when also you get a light bulb and they get a light bulb moment, too

Eric Johnson (01:36:34.126)
Yeah, and from the technician standpoint or anybody's standpoint, yes, most people want to do a good job, but also realize it's very easy to hate on car engineers. Like, oh, like why'd they do this? Same thing happens. Yeah. Same thing happens in HVAC of like the engineer goes like, hey, we really need 10,000 feet for this.

Matt D Strong (01:36:47.335)
The starters upside down or over the air or whatever. Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:36:56.428)
mechanical room and the architect goes nope you have seven figured out like we can't give you any more and then the engineer says hey Will we really need to these valves here? It'd be ideal and they go nope they have to be here because of this or nope we don't have the money for that and so they're working in design constraints you know a lot of people say we don't build stuff like that anymore like everything's just under built it's like well because consumers don't want to pay for ten million dollar boilers that are

an inch thick of steel of like, you know, all this stuff, like everything, you know, is over engineered and everything spread out. Like the cost of square footage and mechanical room is some, I don't know, crazy number and building owners tried to squish that number down as much as possible. And engineers work in their limits and they may say like, Hey, like we need this much time or, you know, this is our bid to engineer this project. And the owner, whoever says, Nope, can you do it for this?

And so like, like there's crunch at all levels. It's not like engineers sit around in their offices and like, how do we screw this up as much as possible for everybody else? Like that, I don't think happens, but also there is a disconnect of like, you know, if you sit in an office all day and you draw stuff and you're like, well, I know how to make this fit. I'll just move this valve up 15 feet near the ceiling. Now everything fits. But then you go out and you're like, shoot.

Matt D Strong (01:38:04.354)
Hahaha!

Matt D Strong (01:38:24.113)
How do you shut the valve off? Yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:38:25.9)
Like that valve, it's 15 feet. That's way up there. well, we'll just put a chain on it. no, because we put tons of other stuff under it. So now there's no way to access the valve even with a lift or get a chain through all the other stuff. And now there's a logistical nightmare of how do we even close off our steam header to the plant just because a valve was stuck in out of the way and...

Like there's all those decisions and I don't know if you've seen this. I think this is probably a trend because the internet of engineering firms that are like on the other side of the country, engineering buildings and engineers never actually visiting the building that they've engineered or like the systems. Like I saw that a lot. Do you see that?

Matt D Strong (01:39:10.919)
That's a huge, definitely a huge part. The virtual assistants, the VAs, they've, you see it a lot because it's kind of, you know, especially when you've got somebody that's pretty savvy and they could size the pipe and size the pump, but they can't put the plans together and they can have somebody do it across the pond for $19 an hour. And it comes out good enough.

You see it quite a bit. I say unfortunately, like there's been times I've considered working with some people like that because of it's my bottleneck and my company is mostly production, CAD.

But yeah, no, there are tons and tons of people that never ever get to step foot into any of their projects. And I think that is the single worst thing that you can do as, imagine working your whole career thinking you were good at designing boiler rooms to find out that you did not, and then you finally go after you've retired and you go in your first boiler room and you're like.

What the hell did I do here? Like I can't open the electrical panel without hitting this or whatever it may be.

One thing I was thinking about as you were talking about, cause I worked for an architect or work with an architect. I worked for an architecture firm. And what's funny is it was harder to work with architects then, because you're like part of their overhead versus when you're being hired out, you know, they are more likely to kind of listen to you and take your advice. but the best way that I've negotiated more space and mechanical areas is you push back on the manufacturer because the IOM will trump

Matt D Strong (01:40:50.262)
code in many cases, or usually will, and I would, kind of one of my famous lines is, you know, the surface clearance that they show on this boiler is the minimum. That's the worst it can be.

Do you want to design the worst mechanical room possible? Or do you want to design one that can like we can put a ladder like you mentioned that to me, like can we actually put a ladder next to this boiler and climb up the ladder and get to the relief valve or to the header butterfly valves or whatever it may be.

Eric Johnson (01:41:24.91)
Yeah, I'll say two things on that is one, I would distinctly remember them, a school I did start up smashing the mechanical room together. There was, and when I say a hundred pounds of stuff in a five pound sack, like.

The boilers that you know, they doors on the front they were condensing boilers and they swung out well They swung out into the Maine entrance and exit of the mechanical room So think of all the contractors walking in and out and you're trying to do boiler startup and the door blocks the entrance of like the hallway of the mechanical room and there's panels like electrical panels on my backside and you know, it's constantly like I'm standing up against the boilers like closing up boilers opening boilers and like people are walking in and out electric

Like trying to move their carts in and out and you're trying to do startup and you're blocking the Maine walkway and that same That same job. They had to remove a strainer for a chiller. It wasn't like a big barrel chiller It was like a real fancy chiller is like a kind of I don't know It was small ish, but I had to remove the side of a boiler a hydronic boiler So they could get the strainer out of the chiller because the chiller was so close to the boiler I'm like like there's something wrong with this like this is brand

new and I have to remove equipment and you're using the dead space in the equipment so that you can have serviceability on your chiller that you installed right next to it. Like that doesn't make sense but my biggest my biggest and easiest pet peeve about hydronic systems is a lot of them have the burner on top and a lot of manufacturers will say hey you can smash the boilers together like no problem. It's okay great but then a lot of people say well like let's space it out but then they space it out

just enough to have like, you can walk through it, but not enough to put a six foot ladder and set it up. It'll be like four inches or five inches short. I don't know what, but so essentially, so you can't set up a six foot ladder in the safe OSHA way. You have to like fold it up and lean it against the boiler now. And if they were to just space the boilers four or five more inches apart, like you would be able to set up a six foot ladder. And like that huge difference makes serviceability

Matt D Strong (01:43:20.763)
you can't get to the top of the burner.

Eric Johnson (01:43:42.031)
crazy different from being able to set up a ladder safely versus having to lean it up or even like pads if they make the pad about like six inches or eight inches bigger than And I think we talked about this. Yeah eight inches bigger than like the actual hydronic boiler Well now you can only set up your ladder eight inches away from the boiler and now you have to cover that gap and then also reach into the boiler to service it so either make the pad two feet bigger

or make it eight inches less and make it just big enough and set the equipment on the side. Like there's all these little things that to an engineer, some designer doesn't really make a big difference, but to a service person, you figure it out very quickly on what's nice, what's not nice. And yeah, especially the whole, tons of jobs with valves in the air that can't be reached. Like that's the probably number one thing.

I've seen this trend. Is it a trend that steam headers get put on the ground on stands versus like the typical in the air steam header?

Matt D Strong (01:44:51.783)
I recently did one that was on the ground for the simple reason that I didn't want chain falls.

I think classically they've always been up high for whatever reason. don't know why. But I did the one that's on my website, which is at White Mountain Paper in New Hampshire. I was like, what is the point of it's just going to make the stand bigger. It's going to make this whole thing more difficult to work on. Basically designed it like a modular boiler plant so that you could isolate every single part of that header without climbing on anything. And I thought that that was pretty slick, but I'm curious which way you're going with it.

Eric Johnson (01:45:30.326)
No, I mean, in my experience, and I've worked in a lot of boiler rooms that were older, but the newer ones, a lot of them had the header on like a four foot stand and one that can all be prefabbed and they just bring it in on a skid, plop it down and you're done. Like when you're drawing 14 inch iron pipe, you're like, yeah, draw it all up. But then you like look at all the chain falls and all the stuff that needs to go to weld this all together and get this up in the ceiling.

You're like, no wonder this little stick of pipe took all these guys two weeks to put together. Like, and that's where the whole prefab thing comes in. But yeah, it's totally, it's so much easier to have your hands on the valve and be able to service the valve and change the valve instead of, yeah, we can put a chain on it, but now it's 10, 15 feet in the air. And now you need to get a lift anytime that the packing leaks, you know, and then the packing.

Matt D Strong (01:46:25.049)
Or if you just got to isolate the DA or whatever, shut down a thing, know, shut down a process or you troubleshoot something. Yeah, you're on a lift. One thing I would encourage engineers to do too, you made me think of this, is actually put yourself in a situation where you can actually move those valves.

Because I'm a power lifter like we talked about. I have almost torn my pec operating a butterfly valve. And you would think it's a quarter turn. How hard could it be? But when you've got all that pressure behind it and it's a six inch pipe, and then you look down and you go, that's what that little section of pipe is. That's my cheater bar so that I can actually open and close this thing.

I think designing around service clearances, I think is the big difference between a good design and a great design. And engineers that truly, truly get it. I've done some really stupid things that when I've seen it, you know, and the contractors, John, that's going to suck. I'm like, well, that's what's on the plans. And then I go on site. I'm like, wow, that really, that really does suck. I should have listened to you. But what I was going to say, my pet peeve on the condensing boilers is, and I'm curious about your opinion as a tech.

When you have the downfire boiler, and again, they're designed to be smashed together, there's so many, and you're talking like, you know, when you get into like the two, three million, four million BTU size, there's way too much shit on the back of the boiler. You've got your stack, you've got your condensate drain, you've got a supply and return, you've got motorized valves, and it's so busy. And it makes, again, that's another thing. You're like, I've met my service clearances, but you can't get into

anything and it's just congested and it takes a long time to longer to build I'm sure.

Eric Johnson (01:48:11.918)
It takes a technician and I've done it in the past tons of times. like.

You gotta go under like a three foot pipe and then like go up and like twist your body and then like fit through the stack and the outdoor air intake and like to, yeah, to remove the panel, to get to the sensor. And yeah, just because the manufacturer says there's clearance, it doesn't, and then, and then you, you know, you stack all this equipment or connections in the back of the boiler. It's not like there's just this like dedicated pathway of like, yep, you just walk around back and here's the,

pathway right to the back of the boiler. It all gets filled and most of the time they smash the boilers against a wall. So you're squeezing between the wall and the stacks and yeah, I mean, but like once again, going back to the whole, the clearances and everything, it's like...

Well, know, they said we needed this much boiler and then the owner gave us this much space and the only thing we could do was smash against the wall. Like that's kind of what we had to do. So like, understand both ways, but when it can be avoided, go walk the final design and see what you can do better. ask the, ask for opinions of like, if you're an engineer working with a, a rep firm, the rep firm sees hundreds of boilers installs.

and knows exactly what engineers miss all the time. Say, hey, this is kind of my plans. This is what I'm doing. Does this seem up to par with you? Like, do you think anything's wrong with this? A big thing I see right now is for some reason they want to run gas lines directly over boilers and put regulators right before the inlets of boilers, which all condensing boiler manufacturers say don't do.

Eric Johnson (01:50:07.822)
But for some reason like to save space engineers are doing that more and more but gas gas line being undersized and Not sized correctly with the regulator for linear feet a pipe after the regulator is probably though one of the top things I saw on hydronic startups and also

When people post startups online, I always look at the gas line. Regulators end up being right on the inlet connection of the boiler. And it's like, all right, did we crack open the manual? Did we even look or something?

Matt D Strong (01:50:39.131)
Yeah. Again, for me, when I've had like the light bulb moment, because I had that specifically on a project with Cleaver and the technician looked at me and he goes, how are we going to replace that burner? And it was, well, we're going to be unthreading some pipe if we have to do it. Yeah, it's a, is a,

The one thing I will say, a good recommendation to engineers too, and this is something that I try to do a good job on, ultimately it makes me stick with the same equipment most of the time. But if you're using a new, if you're specing out a piece of equipment that you've never used before, you should read the entire IOM, front to back. And dude, that will eliminate most of your change orders and headaches on the job site. For me, I'm kind of, I'm fortunate that I do a lot of retrofits.

That's kind of my my niche and it just seems to be I don't know especially with like, you know They're not building very many new brand new schools in the state of Maine, you know, they're kind of these century buildings and a lot of times I'm going in and

know we're ripping out three HB Smiths that were you know 10 section boilers and one of those pads can hold all the condenser boilers for the new system so you end up like I've got some that I posted on a project that I did with energy management consultants which is an Esco that I do a lot of work with and I mean you could put a pool table in this boiler room you know with the space that we saved and you also get the super old like every old school had a thousand gallon domestic water tank because it

before you had the ability to size with diversification and so you take this enormous tank and you replace it with a 119 gallon A.O. Smith or something like that or a pair of indirects.

Matt D Strong (01:52:33.605)
So I'm lucky there and Maine builds boiler or Maine builds buildings out, not up. So a lot of times I am lucky that I will have kind of excess space. say that I was in, had a, I was at a boiler room earlier today where that will not be the case. It was way too small of a boiler room to begin with and ripping out one boiler to putting two Vissmanns in. And it's definitely going to be tight and we'll have to be clever. I'm definitely going to be thinking about the six foot ladder thing that was,

That was like a light bulb moment for me that happened in the LinkedIn DMs when we were talking about it. I never thought about that. Consider the fact that the technician is five foot five and this boiler to the burner is six and a half feet up. And that's the reason why you get those lack of clearances is because everything's vertical, but you still gotta get up there.

Did you ever, I'm curious, did you ever see the clear fires that the Cleaver Brooks clear fires that actually had steps that pulled out?

Eric Johnson (01:53:39.597)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (01:53:40.615)
I thought that was pretty cool. They got rid of it pretty quickly because it was a huge cost that nobody else was doing. But I always thought that that was a nice feature. But you know, when I designed a new boiler room, tried like that steam plant that I did. We basically designed a catwalk to the boiler of the DA so that you could get to all the inspection points, the Maine stop valve. Again, because otherwise you're on a lift and

You could design the best boiler system in the world, but if it's not maintained and you have to retube the boiler in a year, even if it wasn't your fault, they're gonna be thinking about your design and what you could have done better.

Eric Johnson (01:54:19.638)
Yeah, having to knock out a wall to retube the boiler. I've seen plenty of boilers with, or plenty of boiler rooms, older ones with missing cinder blocks in the wall. And you're like, what's going on here? And then you like look at the wall, you look at the boiler, like, that's where the boiler makers were pulling tubes and they knocked out a couple cinder blocks so that they could get the tubes all the way out of the boiler. Yeah.

Matt D Strong (01:54:35.493)
You're like, aha!

Matt D Strong (01:54:43.685)
You know, it's the worst version of that that I've seen. saw on like a 24 million BTU condensing plan at a college. and this, this, reason I'm bringing it up, this is also my highest performing LinkedIn post was on this topic. When you're speccing out a new boiler or whatever it may be, make sure that you can get it in the building.

It sounds so obvious, but I just did it on a project where it was, and it was funny because I checked like the major pieces of equipment, the pumps, the boilers, all good. You know what I forgot to think about? The expansion tank. The expansion tank was this enormous, it was a Taco CA 2000 and it was like six and a half feet in diameter. And guess what the first change order on that job was? Putting a bigger door in the boiler room.

So I've done it, you know, it's, it's, it's the stupidest thing to mess up though. And when you do it, you're like, how did I not think about that? But when I was working in Revit, um, you know, like the 3d CAD program, I would literally just take and, know, click and drag with my cursor and drag the unit from where, how I think they would get it in the building. It'd be like, Ooh, pinch point there. Or, actually that's a temp wall. We could easily take that down or it looks like a wall, but it's just partitions for their offices or whatever.

you know, but that is the single biggest, like one of the single biggest things you could screw up and you spec out what, you know, 2 million bucks worth of boilers and you can't get them in the building. And the first thing they've got to do is, you know, hire a structural engineer to see how they could do it. You really screwed up at that point.

Eric Johnson (01:56:21.034)
It's all about perception. Talk about steam systems. What are some things that you see in your experience commonly missed, common issues that really, really kill a steam system and cause a lot of unnecessary costs that are caught after startup?

Matt D Strong (01:56:42.087)
I would say the biggest thing is maintaining steam quality throughout your system, meaning having a way to drain the condensate out of the system. I've got some amazing work because of these systems and it's pretty easy engineering when you've got 300 feet of, I was just working on a job, was like 14 inch.

200 it was a lot of pounds per hour. I don't remember it was but it was a Big production facility out west and there was no zero drip legs They had a moisture separator before their turbine, but they didn't have any drip legs And it's like you ever get banging in the system. yeah. No, we get some pretty good banging and So yeah, just having doing the very

If anything, I think it should be over designed. Like I always have my drip legs be the same diameter of the pipe, even if it's over, you know, six, eight, 10, 12 inch, just put a T in and have the outlet be, or you know, the downside of the T be the full size of the pipe. The bigger the hole, the better it's going to be at draining the moisture out. You know, I think most engineers, sorry, yeah.

Eric Johnson (01:57:56.91)
Can you talk about that for the people who may not know why?

Matt D Strong (01:58:02.001)
Sure, so like when you buy Cleaver Brooks or Superior or whatever it may be, you're going to get right on the outlet of the boiler.

What is it? 99, 98 % steam quality. So what that means is if you had the pipe, 2 % of the volume would be water and 98 % of the volume would be dry steam. And that's how they advertise it, right? Out of the box. But no piping system is going to be perfectly insulated, even if it's got any amount, you know, an absurd amount of insulation on it. So as that steam travels just from the source to the destination,

it's going to be giving off some heat and condensing. And the more that you do that, you're now pushing the weight of that water with your steam pressure. And this is how you get water hammer. Water hammer kills people. There was a steam explosion at a VA in Connecticut not that long ago that completely vaporized two dudes. I've worked in steam.

that people have died in because of water hammer problems.

because they were working in there and they got a slug and it knocked the you know if you've got a High-pressure steam piping system, especially that underground system where noise isn't a concern You might want to cheat that pipe size down a little bit because and have your velocities be a little bit higher but if you're pushing a bowling balls worth of water at 80 miles an hour under 150 psi that's a ridiculous amount of force I had a lunch and learn presentation that I

Matt D Strong (01:59:44.825)
a number of years ago that had all these photos of water hammer incidents and I mean there were there was a picture that I'm or a photo that I'm thinking of where it was you know it's like a pipeline in Texas or whatever oil refinery all the pipings outside and they had a big you u-shaped expansion loop that they had a water hammer there it clear cut like an acre's worth of trees because it just blew out and just took out everything around it

So yeah, the beauty of your steam system is the fact that it's steam. You don't want to buy a steam boiler and have all the complexities associated with a steam boiler to just create a hydronic system. Your heat transfer isn't going to work good. And in reality, especially in today's day and age, your steam system probably isn't for heating. It's probably for an industrial process.

And if it's a kiln or a kettle, you can have burning and uneven heating. I've been doing a lot of work on steam turbine projects recently and little tiny droplets of water on those rotors that are spinning at, you know, thousands and thousands of revolutions per minute. They can do crazy amounts of damage. So controlling the steam quality or basically how much water is in the steam. You want to keep it as your steam system as dry as possible.

Kind of long-winded there, but

Eric Johnson (02:01:11.208)
No, no. So this is good. like evacuating water out of a steam system is the number one issue of people not doing it. Can you talk about, you, can you get into the sizing of the drip legs? You said, you know, we're going to use full size and like why full size and like the velocity and like a lot of people think like, you know, I have a four inch line and I don't know, we've been going two hours, but I love this conversation. Let me know if you have.

Matt D Strong (02:01:20.199)
I think so because, or sorry, yep.

Eric Johnson (02:01:40.096)
if we need to cut this off.

Matt D Strong (02:01:40.615)
I've got a 430 but I can talk for a few more minutes.

Eric Johnson (02:01:43.886)
Okay, yeah, so let's get through the drip stops. then, so like a lot of people have a four inch line and then they'll put a little two inch hole at the bottom and they think, well, you know, water's gonna drain out. But can you explain why that doesn't drain out and why that doesn't catch the water and why you would size drip lines full size?

Matt D Strong (02:01:47.558)
Yeah.

Matt D Strong (02:02:04.711)
for sure. I guess one thing to make that you know this obviously, but on your drip leg, you know, it'd be a vertical pipe coming down from your horizontal pipe. Connected to that would be your steam trap that basically keeps steam on one side of the system and condensate on the other.

So the reason why you want that drip leg to be full size, and this is the analogy that I've always heard, is that when you have the smaller pipe, it's almost like driving over a little bump in the road. If you're traveling at 80 miles an hour and you hit a little tiny divot in the pavement, you're not gonna notice it. You're gonna just fly right over it. And that's the exact same thing that happens with the condensate is that it doesn't, the velocity is so high that it doesn't actually have time to drop out.

So full-size drip legs give you a bigger, know, it basically allows that condensate to drain out at a slower velocity through the larger pipe and have a collection point. It also helps with collecting debris and other junk that might be in the system. And those should be every like

50 to 100 feet. think 100 feet is the rule of thumb. I encourage people to do 50. And then of course, anytime you change direction vertically up or down, you have to also add one. And this is, I think that fact right there is what makes steam systems tricky. Because in a hydronic system, like, yeah, we'll just go up and over this beam and whatever. But if you do that with a steam system, well, you just added two drip legs, two steam traps, potentially two high pressure condensate lines.

Where does the high-pressure condensate go? I don't know should we send it to the flash tank and cavitate the pumps over and over again? Do we try to get it back to the DA? Do we throw it away? Like, you know, what do we do with it and

Matt D Strong (02:03:56.167)
Condensate is liquid gold as I was kind of trained because it's already heated and it's already chemically treated. So you want to return as much of that back to your system as possible. yeah, the last caveat and engineers do more research to figure out why is don't mix your condensate returns together. There are ways to do it with like sparge tubes and stuff. They're wicked expensive, but yeah, don't,

put your high pressure condensate into a condensate receiver and think that it'll just act like a flash tank because that's how you kill a flash or a condensate receiver in two days or less which I have seen unfortunately more times than I'd like to admit. I had so to end this

You had talked about, I'm gonna, something for you and I'm plug something for me at the end here. You had talked about kind of like, you you just made this podcast and you don't expect people to listen to it. And I think that that's like the mentality that you have to have. You know who Rick Rubin is?

Eric Johnson (02:05:03.414)
No, I do not.

Matt D Strong (02:05:04.135)
He's like a music producer. I mean, he's a huge music producer. Super, super, you know, who's worked with the biggest artists. He's got this crazy long hair. He wears like red glasses. Yep.

Eric Johnson (02:05:13.743)
yeah, yeah, I was gonna say like big white beard or something. Yeah.

Matt D Strong (02:05:17.665)
And he has a bunch of stuff basically talking about it. He's, a super creative, like we would have a hard time talking to him probably, but he doesn't care at all. Like the art, the product is the product and how people perceive it is just how they perceive it. And I think that like, especially with something like this, where you just keep doing it. And if you think it's awesome, probably other people will too. And it might be engineers, it might be a tech, it could be a 16 year old whose parents are

pushing him to go to law school, but he notices that the neighbor down the street whose father works at a plumbing company has a much nicer house and a much nicer pickup truck and everything else. And he's scratching his head like, huh, why does the guy that my dad talks poorly about as a dirty plumber go on more vacations than we do or whatever it may be? So I kind of did that. And this is my turn to plug. I kind of did that with my school community. So school is another hormones.

invention, know, online community for learning.

Eric Johnson (02:06:19.086)
Can you spell that for all the peasants out there who don't know?

Matt D Strong (02:06:23.471)
Yes, it's spelled incorrectly. It's SKOOL.com and I secured skool.com/engineer So if you want to check out it's free. I have I do have a way to make money on that by basically purchasing a course that is how to start an engineering company.

But with that, I just started it and I didn't really know what the intent was. And for a while, I had to pay 10 bucks a month to be there and nobody joined. So I just got rid of it. And all of a sudden, there is a great community of engineering entrepreneurs that are talking about what to do with health insurance, how to get your first job.

you know, how to renew your PE, how to get a PE. And it's just one of those things where I've kind of stepped back and I'm like, well, it's not making me as much money as I wanted, but it's super cool. And so I'm going to just keep rolling with it. And I think like I could completely change it in a couple of years or, know, I could completely change it today and, know, make it about, you know, pay a thousand dollars a month to talk to me for an hour or a week or whatever. But,

I like what I've got right now because it's just kind of, I didn't know what I was creating. I was like, I'm just gonna create it and I'm gonna figure it out afterwards. And I think that that is like, for people that are looking to make the jump, I made a post a while back that's like, if you think you can make money doing engineering or going off on your own, you probably can, so try it. You gotta believe in yourself and when...

I had a college roommate who's a boiler tech and he would love saying risk it for the biscuit.

Matt D Strong (02:08:19.411)
And for whatever reason, like when he said, when I heard that the first time, like it actually clicked. Like you need to take risks to get rewards. And a lot of times that means doing things that's very different from what your peers are doing a two and a half hour podcast with not knowing, like you've got no ads, you're not getting revenue from, I don't know if you are or not. But like, it's just, you're.

Eric Johnson (02:08:43.531)
This, this podcast cost me money.

Matt D Strong (02:08:47.279)
Yeah, and my school community, like I pay a hundred bucks a month for my school community. I think I've made $300 and I've had it for six months. So I'm in the negative, but it's just one of those, like I'm faithful that because I believe in it, it will become something cool and potentially greater than me, you know?

Eric Johnson (02:09:06.03)
Yeah, that's, communities are huge and that's technology is dividing everyone. And, you know, we have everybody working from home now and doing all this, you know, the, and you mentioned it earlier, the ASHRAE dinners, I go to my ASHRAE dinner, even though I'm not an engineer, you don't have to be an engineer to be a member of ASHRAE, your local chapter, you have a local chapter.

It changes. Some local chapters are very involved. Some are not super involved in like how often they meet, when they meet. Some of them will have just like a, a, a lunch that, you know, some people can't make, but it's easier when you have a dinner that's after work and the difference between sitting down and meeting somebody at a table versus, Hey, we've been emailing for six months. Like the relationship is totally different.

And you're just a name on a screen on an email signature. And like only, I think 10 % or something of emotion comes through in text. And they may think, man, this guy, he's so full of himself. He thinks he's always right and all this stuff. And you're on the other side of like, man, I'm just trying to help him and all this stuff. And then you meet at dinner and you're like, like this is totally different than how I pictured he'd be because of, know, and I read this all wrong.

You start helping each other and send work to each other. in that whole relationship and community thing is huge. yeah, get involved. One, it takes effort. No community. A community is only as good as the people who show up. So if you expect the community to give you things and you don't contribute, you are a consumer, not a creator. So don't expect actually anything to come out of it. Don't go to one ASHRAE dinner and be like, well, that was a waste.

and then never go again. Like go meet people, talk to people. If you are a part of a company that sends eight people to the ASHRAE dinner, don't sit eight people and all your coworkers at the same table. Spread out, talk to different people. That happens at mine where one company will sit at the table. I'm like, you're talking to your coworkers. Like what's the point here of just coming to dinner that your employer is paying for, but.

Matt D Strong (02:11:18.981)
you train and then yeah exactly

Eric Johnson (02:11:29.538)
Get involved, meet people, get active on LinkedIn. I still think LinkedIn is underutilized by most people. think it's like less than 10 % of people actually post on LinkedIn. Go out, post, it's not as scary as you think it is. So many opportunities have come through LinkedIn and I'm sure you can say the same thing. So.

Matt D Strong (02:11:50.507)
I've had some great ones and this is honestly a really cool one. I was following Boiler Wild and you well before I was posting on LinkedIn and to get the, hey, you want to be on the podcast is super awesome. Hey, I'm going to do, I'm going to show people how easy it is. I'm going to take a picture of the screen here. Boom.

And that's my LinkedIn post for the day. I'm to just write a quick blurb, had an awesome time on Eric Johnson's podcast, boiler wild, check it out here. And, yeah, post on LinkedIn every day. It's not hard. And it will, you will have an enormous advantage over everybody else in your industry because go tell me the last time you saw an advertisement for an architecture firm or an engineering firm, you probably have never seen one unless you're working at a hospital or a school and they're, know, trying to work for you, but it's like one of the biggest difference makers and

Yeah, give away the secrets and sell the implementation.

Eric Johnson (02:12:45.538)
Yeah, I could talk about LinkedIn all day, but post on your own account. Don't hide behind the company picture. Everybody wants authentic communication and don't use AI to write your post of like, of all this stuff and AI pictures. Like I posted a picture, I was wearing a boiler related shirt and I posted a picture of a Home Depot security screen of checking out.

Matt D Strong (02:12:58.929)
Thank you, I was waiting for that one.

Eric Johnson (02:13:13.58)
It got like 70 likes and like 4,000 impressions. I was like, this was a throwaway picture of like, Hey, I just want to post my boiler shirt that I was wearing at Home Depot and the security cameras are too low for tall people. So it just takes a picture of my chest instead of my face. And I'm like, why would 70 people like this and 4,000? Like this is a, and I put zero thought into it. It's always the post that you put zero thought, not that that like 70 likes is nothing, but people know you.

Now, whenever I go to conferences, not that I'm like famous or well-known, like nobody knows I exist, but people, I'll go to a booth and they're like, you're the guy on LinkedIn. And like, there's so much opening there instead of who's this young guy who opened this training company who thinks he's just hot stuff. Like they feel like they know you and you start the conversation different. It's way better than like, hey, here's my business card. And then you email them.

And they're like, wait, who is this person again? Like if they see your LinkedIn post for the last nine months, and then they meet you at a trade show, they're gonna be like, yeah, this person. And then you're top of mind every single day if you're posting, even if they don't get on, they'll get on LinkedIn and they'll eventually see your posts. And then when the work comes around and they're like, hey, man, we really need an engineer right now to like do this pickup job. Who really knows boilers?

Matt D Strong (02:14:13.168)
Yeah.

Eric Johnson (02:14:39.35)
Matt Strong, I know a guy and top of mind and you don't have to be the best. You just have to be top of mind. And yeah, that's, that's my pitch to post. Tell, tell the audience where to find you. And yeah, we'll end this amazing podcast.

Matt D Strong (02:14:55.351)
Awesome. So you guys can find me. The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Matt Strong the American engineering company website for the web, the website for the business is American engineering.co. If you want to email me, it's just Matt at American engineering.co. Once you email me, you'll get my phone number. I'm not going to put my phone number on here.

because I've burned myself doing that in the past. And then finally, join the school community skool.com That's SKOOL.com slash engineer. It's free. You just hit the sign up button with the reason I got to leave at for 430 is I've got a meeting with those guys, 430 to 530. We meet once every month or so, just kind of a roundtable discussion. This one's on goal setting for 2026. And it's really cool because you've got guys like me that are, you

about almost two years into their entrepreneurship. We've got this dude, Wade, who's been doing it for 20 years, which is amazing. I've got Ernesto out in California, who's thinking about it. I feel like I shouldn't have said that. Hopefully his employer doesn't listen. But it's awesome. It's a cool community of people and just it's awesome to be around like-minded people that are working for the same goal and want to, you

escape the matrix and work for themselves. So, Eric, dude, thank you so much. Let me know what I got to do to get a boiler's hat. I'll trade you a American engineering hat if you're interested.

Eric Johnson (02:16:29.55)
Yeah, I can send you one. I normally have them for sale, but I can send you one since you came on the podcast. Yeah, just DM me your address and I can send you one. I drew this all up myself and yeah, I think it's cool. Kind of getting the heritage script going.

for boilers. I like boiler history. But also if they haven't figured it out, what location are you in if they need engineering services?

Matt D Strong (02:17:04.625)
So I am located in Maine, based out of Auburn, Maine. I do work throughout all of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, also licensed in New York, working on Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio. So if you got anything going on in any of those states, but especially New England and the boiler plants, I can really help folks out kind of rapidly. And that's what I like to do.

Eric Johnson (02:17:34.808)
Alright, that is everything. I gotta figure...

46. Building Strength in Business and Life with Matt Strong

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