- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JQ9SMPECFBH36FN28408JCR6 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQ9SMPECFBH36FN28408JCR6)
Transcript
[Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: What’s up, man? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Charlie, what’s going on, brother? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How you doing? Good. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: You gotta forgive me. [Michael Houck]: I’m stuck in some gnarly traffic right now. Oh, you’re good. I’ll go camera off then, too, so you don’t need to worry about it. We can just do audio. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Solid. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: How you doing, man? Oh, shoot. We are so busy. It’s been so chaotic. And I can’t complain. [Michael Houck]: How about yourself? Yeah, I’m not surprised. It sounds good. Especially if it’s starting to get a little warmer in some places too, but you guys are starting to get swamped. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I think you’re good. A lot of clients we talked to previously are starting to feel like chaos with tenants moving, switching into AC mode. They’re just, they’re so overwhelmed. They don’t know That’s dope, dude. Yeah, things are good on my side. [Michael Houck]: I’m traveling around still a bit, but back in the US now, I’m in Nashville this week. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, it’s good. Never been here before, but enjoying it. Trying to see if it’s a potential spot to plant some roots and move, but we’ll see. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: You know, I’ve seen so many people do that. If you do, Nashville is an amazing city. I don’t know how long you’ve been there so far, but I really like it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I got here like a week ago. It’s been nice. I think the downtown is a little crazy for me, but some of the places around it are very nice. So I think it’s a contender. I was in Dallas before this and really, really loved Dallas too. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. I mean, those are two great spots. Nashville downtown. Absolutely crazy, you’re right. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m pretty low key, so there’s a little much for me, but the rest of the city was great. And then we’re going to Charleston next, and we’ll see how that goes. You’re picking some good ones, man. I’m jealous. And honestly, if I had to do it all over again, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Greenville, South Carolina, but that is awesome. OK, dude, people keep telling me to go to Greenville. Everyone’s telling me I should check that out while I’m in Carolina. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, it’s incredible. So you got an international airport there, you got the lake, you got the mountains, you got an awesome river that runs through it. It’s very outdoorsy. And the downtown is like super walkable, restaurants everywhere. I love that place. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think I’m going to take a little road trip up while I’m in Charleston, like spend a weekend up in Greenville or something, because you’re like the third or fourth person to say something like that to me. So it’s like, gotta listen at some point, you know? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. I’m glad we’re able to connect. I appreciate you sending over that thoughtful email. I don’t think Andrew’s traveling right now, but we went live on that Drake News newsletter and shoot, I’ve done like 42 meetings and still have a couple more and starting to get like second and third round with a couple [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: groups. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: And there’s two groups that are really doing some serious DD on us. Great Cap and IA Capital that are both kind of real estate focused on their thesis. So I think there’s going to be a potential fit there for us. [Michael Houck]: I’m not surprised, but super excited I mean, sounds like a lot of chaos for you prepping for all these calls and then handling the processes and everything. But yeah, I’m not surprised at all. So good to hear. I think, how does that change your thinking about the round in terms of maybe how much capital take on or how hard we’re going to push on anything else in the short term? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, so I think wherever this goes, right, like we want to raise in the ballpark of $3.5 million for us to really get operations ramped up. And then also that allows us to focus on the Dallas market within the next 12 months and carrying that capital towards that, hiring on more techs. And then beefing up the sales staff and sales I think I lost you can’t hear you. You’re back. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s my speaker. It’s better. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, that’s way better, actually. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, but I was just saying, like, you’re marking that for marketing, sales staff, and then expansion to Dallas within the next 12 months is what we’re thinking about as we really start to progress this around for us. [Michael Houck]: I guess if you get to a point where you’ve got 3.5 on the table and folks are coming at you, it’s oversubscribed, is there a strategy about, okay, well, we’ll take up to four, we’ll sell a little bit more of the company and we’ll do that extra 500k, or is it more so we want to keep it hard at around 3.5? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, we’re open to that and we’ve got open equity to do so, right? I think we’ve got about like, need to double check, but about 18% open. So there’s room on the table for that. And like, obviously, Andrew and I talked to you before, I want to keep you involved in some sort of capacity. And then also leveraging some of your contacts to grow out that piece as well. Um, keep the cap table relatively small, right? Cause I don’t want to be chasing around signatures. Um, but I mean, if nothing comes to this round, like I really want to explore the sidecar idea. Um, and you know, chasing more high net worth individuals with deep real estate pockets is what I’m thinking. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think if you guys this quickly, this far down the road with these like two groups, like let’s see where that goes and let’s see if it’s sort of the right partner and just roll with it. But we have this other option kind of in our back pocket. Are there specific people who you have on your radar who you’d want me to reach out to in the short term? Because it seems like things are moving pretty fast. So if there are folks who are targets, we should probably try to get this conversation going with them ASAP. If you want to send over like an email with a couple names, I would like, [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: Think about it, right? Like the number 1 target I have, that’s like, We haven’t even really talked yet is jail spark because that’s a that’s a perfect partnership. I don’t know if you know what. Over there, but we do have a meeting coming up with them back channel. Can be involved in this as well and then I need to think of other like commercial real estate venture funds that do prop tech and like service type companies. I need to think about that because we’ve talked to the Nuveen folks and they were hot and heavy early on but they backed out because we were super early days and I’ve got a good relationship but that type of group that has like a large real estate portfolio presence is the target. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, my old co-founder, um, from launch house, his uncle is pretty big in that scene. Um, and as, as a firm, and then there’s one other contact is pretty well connected to, I could go to too. So let me put some feelers out, um, and I’ll, I’ll get back to you. Okay. But yeah, all sounds, all sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: That sounds great. This quarter one has been fricking unbelievable for us. I’m super happy with everything. Hit profitability to the small. It sounds like now it’s time to now it’s time to go under again for a while. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool, man. Okay, look, I guess, are there any actionable next steps besides reaching out to these folks that you want me to do? Flash, is there anything open that you would say, hey, send over and I’ll just get involved more formally that way? Or should we just keep it fluid until the round comes together? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: I don’t know if you have our last financial model of the product. I can send that over if you want, because we actually, I don’t think you do, because we just updated it to reflect tariff pricing and stuff. No, I don’t have that. Yeah, I’ll send that over. And then I don’t know if you have the last GAC that went live on June Rick Dukes. [Michael Houck]: I have a deck from, oh it doesn’t say the date on here, does it? No. It just says, airless leave behind deck 2024, so it’s probably… I’ll send you both. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: I’ll send you both, and like, yeah, I would love an intro to those two guys you were thinking about. [Michael Houck]: And, sorry, I need to think of some more groups, see if there’s any sort of leeway in I’ll also talk to some more high net worth folks that I know who probably do have connections in this space that I just am not aware of because I’ve never talked to them about it. But yeah, I’ll put some failures out, say, I had a pretty crazy afternoon, either tonight or tomorrow, and I’ll let you know. That sounds good. Cool, man. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: We’re rolling over here, so let’s keep the momentum. Yes, sir. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Excited. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for thanks for keeping me in the loop and we’ll see what we can do here. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: So I’m gonna make it to Atlanta. We’re grabbing drinks or something. [Michael Houck]: Maybe I’ll stop by my little my little southeastern road trip here. I’ll let you know. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: I’d be happy to show you like airlines day to day get you up on the roofs and how we do everything. Oh, I think experience. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I am. Would you guys be interested in doing some, uh, some YouTube content? Cause we’re, we’re, we’re going pretty hard on YouTube this year. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: I’d be curious what, um, cause I’m a, I’m literally about to sign a contract to do like an infomercial. Not like an infomercial, I guess I just called it that, but like a promo video of Air Last with like client, client testimonials and like cool drone footage. So I’m curious to get your thoughts on that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Happy to. After to chat through it Like good like thoughts now or like thoughts after taking a look at it or what do you mean? [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: maybe what I’ll do is like I’m signed the contract and like we’ve set a date to Over like a video that they did that I liked that I think is a good example, okay This purpose was really just for like LinkedIn content put on the website and then explain her video of the process, I’ll send that over to you. And I want to get your thoughts of like, all right, this is lame, or this is like, yeah, that’s good. And what else should we be doing? Because I’m getting a little crazy on AI marketing with this. It’s too far down the rabbit hole with that. [Michael Houck]: No, dude, my friend has an agency of doing these digital twins videos. Um, there’s a lot of that going around right now. So yeah, we can talk about it. Um, I’ll take a look at what, what you have and what you, um, the one, the one you said you like, and I’ll, I’ll give some thoughts and feedback, um, very different settings, like between making it a marketing video for LinkedIn versus making it like an explainer video for the site. So I think my first thought would be rather than trying to thread that needle, probably better to just pick one and optimize for the best. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. For sure that’s a good point so I don’t want to like overdo it on one video and everyone’s it’s just like scrambled baths yeah yeah because if any the people on linkedin will be like oh this seems like a [Michael Houck]: like a product explainer video and then the people on your site will be like this seems like a social media post like you know what I mean you don’t want to fall in the middle yeah so I’m learning all [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: About this ai craziness on the marketing side and it’s What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen? So I met with a guy who is based out of Dubai and essentially what we were going to do, he had a whole customer service component, which, you know, that, that was cool. I thought, but we didn’t really necessarily need it. And then we were focused on content creation then. And there was two avenues you could do it. Right. Generated content, which is really cool. Which I didn’t feel like was great for the product and so essentially it would be like me or my techs with their marketing or their their software that’s all AI back you tell them what you did that day and then they ask all these follow-up questions and then they give you a script after all the follow-up questions like all right this is what Charlie you’re gonna be reading off or Dylan you’re gonna be reading off hold the camera angle here send us pictures for this and then send it over to them. They go and edit everything, and then they generate the content for you to make it the most, I guess, viral possible way that you can for commercial real estate and HVAC. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like they’re taking some of the hard parts off your plate, which is good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I don’t know. Experimenting with I don’t know how how video as a channel works for For the product, but I got about some thought into it and follow up. Yeah, that sounds good Okay, make a note to do that I’ll just do some like marketing thoughts in general and Send you a little bit. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: Hopefully it’s awesome. Now anything marketing wise Because it’s competitive with HVAC and everything is very archaic, right? Like, you’ll have some guys that advertise on YouTube, but majority of stuff’s like billboard ads, right? And like, that’s pretty old school. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, I think a lot of people, especially in these industries that don’t have a lot of new entrants like you guys, a lot of them have their marketing channels they’ve been running for a long time and they’ve been successful. But the problem is for them, good for us is that a lot of these people who, even if it’s like these commercial real estate guys, everyone spends time on social media now. And so it’s like, there are places to get, get in front of them. You know, there’s email as well. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: We can do some interesting things with, so I’ll, I’ll put together some thoughts. [Michael Houck]: I’m very interested in that. Yeah. Okay. Cool. That gives me something to come back with. So I’ll, Um, I’ll look into some, uh, I’ll do some, some outreach to, uh, folks I know. And also, um, you send over the, um, the videos you like and then, um, I’ll give you some general sort of marketing stuff as well. All right, man. [Conference Room (Charlie Banks) - Speaker 1]: That sounds good. Great. [Michael Houck]: Um, no, I did hope to get out of that traffic, but, um, yeah, I’m, uh, I’m pumped for you guys and, uh, Glenn, talk soon.