DGS 288: Wires, Pipes, and Signals: Everything You Wish You Knew About Home Utilities
Description
As a property manager, you’re familiar with the uncomfortable shuffle when trying to ensure utilities are set up correctly at move-in. What if you could make the whole process easier?
In this episode of the Property Management Growth Show, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with the founder of Utility Profit, Zac Maurais, to discuss wires, pipes, and signals: Everything you wish you knew about home utilities.
You’ll Learn
[01:48 ] How Zac Built a $100 Million Business
[07:38 ] Solving Utility Challenges with a Streamlined Tool
[15:54 ] Using Utility Profit to Make Extra Profit
[23:26 ] Integrations and Frequently Asked Questions
[30:20 ] Take Action on The Things You’re Avoiding!
Quotables
“I think the secret to being smart is just being willing to look stupid.”
“Done is better than perfect.”
“Have a bias for action. Get your hands dirty. Do it yourself.”
“ Whatever it is that you think that's holding you back, just start trying to do it.”
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00 ] Zac: It's almost like we're like taking the Yellow Pages and then putting it online or something. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a wacky problem that we're solving there.
[00:00:08 ] Jason: So you're single handedly bringing the utility space into the future. So, All right.
[00:00:16 ] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Property Managers to the Property Management Growth Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur and you want to add doors, you want to make a difference, you want to increase revenue, you want to help others, you want to impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager and you just don't know it. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it.
[00:00:47 ] Jason: You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win.
[00:01:13 ] Jason: I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show and I'm hanging out today with Zac Maurais. Did I say it right?
[00:01:25 ] Jason: That's right, yes.
[00:01:26 ] Jason: Hey. All right, cool. It's great to have you on the show. So Zac we're going to be chatting today about wires, pipes, and signals, everything you wish you knew about home utilities.
[00:01:38 ] Jason: I think this will be interesting to our listeners because, you know, we get into this stuff as property management people. So, so Zac before we get into that though, give us a little backstory on you. How'd you get into being an entrepreneur? When did you first figure that out, that you maybe were one and then we can get into why you started this business so that you've got going and tell us, tell everybody about it.
[00:01:58 ] Jason: Cool.
[00:02:00 ] Zac: Let's do it. Yeah. So, quick intro myself, I live here in Austin, Texas. I've been an entrepreneur now for better part of a decade and a half. Right out of college I started a business it was actually a food delivery business called Favor. We ended up scaling that business to having 50,000 delivery drivers in the state of Texas.
[00:02:22 ] Zac: So it was the second largest employer in the state. And over the course of building it up over a couple of years, we were doing over a hundred million dollars of food sales a year. So sizable company and we sold that to HEB grocery and yeah.
[00:02:38 ] Jason: And if people don't know, HEB I'm in the Austin area, I'm up in Round Rock.
[00:02:41 ] Jason: But if people don't know HEB. HEB consistently wins the best grocery store awards like in America every year. Like it's always winning.
[00:02:51 ] Zac: It's kind of amazing. I mean, they are an institution. There's so many small towns across Texas where the only show in town, I would kind of say it's akin to like a Walmart or something like that for a national brand that people would be more familiar with.
[00:03:04 ] Zac: Family run business, been around for a hundred years. So it's cool that it had joined forces with Favor. And learned a lot from doing that company. I mean, at the time that we sold it, we had over 140 corporate employees, designers and software engineers and business intelligence people and salespeople.
[00:03:24 ] Zac: So I'm right there with you, Jason, where I like growth. I like growing things and learning about business and learning about new categories. So as I sold it, I was looking for the next thing to do.
[00:03:35 ] Jason: So people are clear, Favor, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but Favor competes with like Instacart and like some of these, it's like a delivery service.
[00:03:44 ] Zac: That's right. So the way that the service worked was, it was like an on demand. It was part of the on demand delivery kind of thing that was happening. The gig economy, you know, people will probably remember Lyft coming out and Uber. There wasn't one for delivery of kind of like fast casual food or groceries yet.
[00:04:02 ] Zac: And we brought that into the market. We had first mover.
[00:04:05 ] Jason: Oh yeah. So yeah, it's kind of like Uber Eats and, you know, these kind of things.
[00:04:08 ] Zac: Exactly. So you could tap a button, request a Favor, and then someone would go shopping for you, go pick up some tacos or yeah, run at the grocery store or something like that and bring it to you in 45 minutes or less.
[00:04:20 ] Jason: Got it. And is Favor just a Texas thing?
[00:04:23 ] Zac: At one point in time we tried to go national expansion, but it was a bit of a wartime thing that was going on. Yeah. A lot of VC dollars getting put in. And we had a very strong Texas brand. We had over a million people in Texas using it.
[00:04:37 ] Zac: Yes. So we said we just doubled down on home base.
[00:04:40 ] Jason: I mean, Texas is like its own little universe. We've got Favor, we've got HEB, we've got, you know, there's all these things that are just specifically Texas. So if y'all come to Texas, you got to like experience the whole Texas deal. You got to go to an HEB, you got to go to Bucky's, you got to go to all these things, right?
[00:04:56 ] Zac: So yeah, right. When you're here in town for Jason's event, go get yourself some Yeti swag.
[00:05:02 ] Jason: Yes.
[00:05:02 ] Zac: And then order yourself a Favor.
[00:05:04 ] Jason: Yes. There you go. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, and people get really religious about their, you know, things like Yeti. It's like Yeti Mecca. Like people, like my brother-in-law comes into town. He is like, "I got to go to the Yeti store." He's like, just like starry-eyed in there. And I'm like, "why? Why?" Coolers, thermases? I don't know. Cool drinks. Yeah. Yeah. It's a thing. So he like collects them, and then sometimes he's flipping them too. Like there's limited edition things, so. My brother-in-law's name is Jason also, so he might listen to this.
[00:05:36 ] Jason: So Jason, I mentioned you on my podcast, so, all right.
[00:05:39 ] Jason: Shout out to Jason.
[00:05:41 ] Jason: Shout out to Jason. So, cool. So Zac, I mean, that's a pretty impressive thing. Not many people can say they built a hundred million dollar, you know, business or had an exit or something like that. So, and then what did you do next?
[00:05:55 ] Jason: Like, you sell this thing, did you lose all meaning and purpose in life and decide to start a new business or what happened?
[00:06:01 ] Zac: I think that happens with some people, right? You sell it, you have somebody, you're like, "what am I going to do with my life now?" I'm going to take a good thing and somehow it becomes a bad thing.
[00:06:09 ] Zac: But I just, I really like building. And I like the process of entrepreneurship where you talk to people, you try to find a problem and you like go hit a whiteboard, you sketch, it becomes more tangible, and then all of a sudden you can partner with an engineer and make it and then bring it back to the customer.
[00:06:26 ] Zac: And I just like that. It kind of just scratches something in my brain, I think. And something else that's been cool for me on my entrepreneurship journey. I had mentioned that I've been doing it now for a decade and a half and the entire time that I've been working and doin
United States
