The Six Rs of Sales: Doug Vail’s Process for Revenue Predictability

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Doug Vail, Chief Revenue Officer at Industrial Inspection and Analysis.

Founded in 2015, IIA is a high-growth industrial inspection and analysis company serving a variety of sectors by offering professional, fast and accurate services. Their mission is to help clients achieve success by ensuring safety, reliability and compliance within their operations. Doug brings over 15 years of experience in sales and operational leadership. He has experienced with private equity ownership or restructuring an enterprise to position it for private equity engagement. Doug has played a key role in forming a best-in-class industrial inspection and certification platform that supports industries across the country. Beyond his professional pursuits, Doug is also the founder of Emma’s Ambassadors, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children with autism. He has held several leadership roles throughout his career focusing on strategic growth and organizational excellence. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdVac Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CRO of IIA, Doug Vale. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Doug Vail: Thanks so much for having me on, Anthony. Looking forward to the discussion.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay, so Doug, I understand you are a proud graduate of the University of Alabama. I imagine that your pretty strong technical background with a degree in mechanical engineering has given you some credibility in the various sales and business development roles you’ve had over the years. Did you know that you always wanted to get into sales and marketing when you first started your career or did that kind of happen by accident?

Doug Vail: Definitely more accident than plan. I was right out of school, got into some different manufacturing roles, Anthony, and thought I enjoyed that. I thought it was a fine way to make a living. That’s kind of what engineers do. If we’re not going to be designing things, we like to build stuff.

So being able to make parts, manufacture parts, or produce materials for a variety of different industries, it’s kind of an okay way to go. Actually what happened was the sales opportunity presented itself through my sister and she ran into an old friend of mine that I went to high school with. He was looking for somebody who had more of a technical background to help lead and grow sales in the Southeast for, I would say, another high growth company that did a lot of specialized welding. So familiarity with some of the welding processes and things like that, that certainly helped. And so that when I went to work there, though, my ability to connect with the customers on what types of, you know, what value those particular services and technologies provided was a little bit easier, I think. And then knowing that I had a mechanical engineering degree, that I wasn’t just kind of, you know, a pushy sales guy, it definitely helped make those initial connections. And then from there, it was about growing and improving the overall value that I was delivering to those customers and maintain a lot of those relationships over the course of the 25 years I’ve been doing this.

Anthony Codispoti : So the strong technical background, and you know, you sort of had sort of been, I don’t know, nurtured or cultivated in you, just kind of how your personality is.

Doug Vail: I guess. It was kind of interesting when I was in school, one of my good friends I’d met in a lab. And, you know, I look around and I would see a lot of these mechanical engineers, these people that were grinding extremely hard every day to learn the material and make sure they complete and things. And I didn’t find it to be all that difficult. So I had a lot more free time to go and enjoy myself at the University of Alabama, maybe more so than I should admit. But when I was able to do that, you know, I began to attract others into my world and not really knowing what that meant. But my father had a, you know, 30 plus year career in sales. And that just sort of maybe the person that I had developed without really knowing it.

And then when I got into engineering, I thought surely I would get into management and leading people and all the other things in engineering. But the sales was something that really didn’t cross my mind until it was presented to me. And when I got to see their approach to the market, the value creation that they were providing to their customers, all I could think about was, man, I wish I had somebody like this who would sell to me versus some of the, you know, used car salesmen that I dealt with on a daily basis in a production environment where they want to sell you this widget or that widget. Something was truly adding value to a customer was something that I really, really appreciated.

And ever since then, I’ve looked for companies that are doing that very same thing, you know, avoiding trying to get into commodity selling and providing real solutions at real value.

Anthony Codispoti : What were maybe a couple of the more important stops for you along the way before you got to IIA in terms of really helping you to level up your skill and your craft?

Doug Vail: Well, I think when we, the original job I had, I was able to progress through my career with them. And we were a very small, about about a $60 million business when I joined it doing this specialty welding.

We grew up to about $100 million. And then in private equity, we started taking notice. And we became part of what was the Equilex family at the time. And then we began buying some very large service companies that were not like ours and just building a truly industrial service platform.

So there was a lot of challenge in that and understanding, you know, how they were successful, what drives their revenue, what drives their growth, what drives great profitable revenue. And so just learning that on a scale that we were, we went, you know, I was, it was a $100 million company. We got to 250 pretty quick. And then we started bolting this on next thing, you know, we’re an $800 million company.

And looking at that and going, this is pretty amazing. And, but there’s so much going on and trying to learn how to manage all the different divisions of that business. But with a, you know, overriding strategic direction was pretty challenging. But it did help as I’ve gone into other companies that are looking to potentially divest at some point or sell to a private equity group, be able to quickly get to, okay, here’s what we’ve got to get to pretty rapidly with this, with this particular company or these, this multiple service company and the types of things we’ve got to do to grow that and be successful so that when an investor looks at it, they can see that kind of trajectory of the business and also believe that it’s going to predict bigger growth later on. And, and then the integration piece obviously was a lot of that too, just having these companies come in and how you get them set up and who’s getting which players for their team for ops or sales or finance, whatever it might be, just all those things and making sure that when I look at the organizations that I’m working with and for, we can quickly identify these roles and get people in the right seats.

Anthony Codispoti : So in the work that you’ve done, would you say the biggest lever that you’ve had to pull in sort of affecting that growth is acquisition?

Doug Vail: Yeah, I think, I think that certainly helps that those are the big accelerators, if you will, that but there’s always an element of organic growth that is, is critical to the health of the business and making sure that you’re adding new customers. Cross-selling obviously is a big deal when you have multi multiple services like this industrial inspection company I’m with now, IIA. We have so many different services that cross into the industries and customer base that we have. So making sure that we’re promoting that effectively and communicating those capabilities to our customer base is an absolute. So being able to organically grow at a reasonable pace and I’d say eight to 10, eight to 15 percent is probably a pretty good year over year increase.

But then, yeah, bolting on new services or bringing in similar services but just with more scale to them and then being able to roll that stuff out to the end markets is really important.

Anthony Codispoti : So with IIA, how many acquisitions have taken place?

Doug Vail: So they started in 2015 long before I got here, actually five years before I got here, they had done 17 and then we divested three and we’ve done six more, I guess it’s six now, yeah.

So we’ve done a total of 23 where basically the company we have right now is 21 different operating companies that are now assimilated into what is IIA and we’re all one company now, which was never easy but that was one of the first challenges we had when we got here.

Anthony Codispoti : Is it typical that a client of one of these entities would be a client or could be a client of multiple other entities or are these pretty well siloed services that there isn’t really much cross-selling that goes on?

Doug Vail: I think that if in fairness, it’s not everybody serves everybody, there’s not that, but there is a lot more cross-sell opportunity because we strategically think about the types of companies we want to buy to bring into the fold so that we’re not doing something that’s so out of the realm that we’re comfortable with and markets, customers, geographic, those kind of factors, making sure that when we do buy companies that they’re going to contribute to the overall enterprise and that there is that opportunity to cross-sell them. We focus a lot of time during the integration process and seeking and defining what those things are going to be and how we’re going to go about doing it with their sales and marketing efforts.

Anthony Codispoti : We’d kind of like to peel back a layer of the onion and understand that process a little bit more. It’s one thing if I’ve got company A over here, I’ve got a good customer base and I’ve got company B over here, they’ve got their own customer base and there’s some crossover and now the two are coming together. It’s sort of easier to see like, okay, let’s introduce everybody to the other company, but when you’ve got 20 plus entities, how do you even begin to wrap your head around, let alone your sort of your frontline teams heads around, how do we find who’s the right fit and make those introductions and try to do some of that cross-selling? What does that look like from a like an operational or procedural standpoint?

Doug Vail: I wish it was easy to tell you the answer, but the reality is, is everyone’s a little bit different and you have to kind of come with an approach of, I need to learn about how they go to market and what their value message is and who they’re targeting, like what industries and like what makes the most sense for them and where they’ve found the most success and then we can kind of take that and go, that’s very similar to X, Y or Z and start connecting those dots so that it’s not just like a, okay, they’re just like these guys, this service line and this service line fit really well.

We want to try to get it across as many as we possibly can and so we ask not only a lot of questions of the acquisition team that we’re potentially acquiring, but we’re asking a lot of these questions internally about, hey, what if we were doing this and we find things out all the time in that process that like, oh, they’ve been outsourcing that particular request, so now we can bring it in-house? Yeah, that’s a win, right? Like that’s an easy one, let’s go make sure we jot that down. So the other ones are a little bit tougher, but when you, to your point, I guess, when you’ve had 20 acquisitions, you really do kind of look at how your umbrella of services satisfies the end markets. In fact, we go through a strategic planning session annually and one of the things that we’re looking at now are like, what are some of the things that our customers need to be tested or inspected or certified or need to be done to keep them within compliance that we don’t do? And like, should we go buy that or should we go develop the capability to go deliver that? And the whole point being is if we were just looking at ourselves all the time and not really thinking about the customers, you can kind of get stuck a little bit. So now it’s like, what are our customers asking of us that we’re not able to deliver and what’s the right pathway to go make that happen for them and bring that single source solution provider story to even more customers?

Anthony Codispoti : So testing, analysis, certification, verification, give us like some more specific examples of the kinds of things that you do and the kinds of folks that you would serve. And I know with 20 plus companies that could take us the rest of the afternoon.

Doug Vail: So I’ll try the readers digest. Yeah, I’ll try to give you a couple of examples or people will probably know this. So I think we’ve all driven down roads, highways, country back roads, whatever. And we’ve seen one of these trucks parked on the side of the road has got the outriggers. So it’s holding its stability, but it’s got a lift device on it and the guy standing up there, maybe he’s clearing trees or he’s trimming some, you know, some limbs around some power lines or guys that actually are working on the lines themselves and running power to new neighborhoods or improving the infrastructure. Well, every one of those lift trucks that somebody sits in is required to be inspected annually and certified that it is functionally operational and safe for a human being to go stand in that thing for in some cases 10 hours a day, right?

In some not so great conditions. So our company is the largest third party inspector of those types of equipment in the United States of America. And we just acquired a company in Western Canada called Cova Engineering and we’re now the largest third party inspector of that stuff in Canada too.

So it’s a pretty, pretty, like again, it’s a requirement to do this on an annual basis and a lot of people that do it would be like an OEM or even sometimes the line contractor or utility will do that inspection themselves, but they have found that there’s greater value in us doing it third party unbiased, we give them the results, they can make some decisions. And then other things too would be, let’s say a customer is or a customer is manufacturing a brand new medical device and these things are very small, very fine precision manufacturing. Well, every one of those types of parts needs to be inspected to make sure that when they do get to their main manufacturing process that it’s within the design tolerances. And we have some very high precision equipment that’ll get down and look at that piece of equipment or that part down to basically the size of a pair on your head, not mine but yours. But yeah, be able to give you that kind of dimensional view of how that part’s being manufactured and how consistent it is on these tight tolerances. So precision, high precision affects you in medical, it’s aerospace, it’s department of defense, those kinds of things. So those industries are something that value that level of precision and repeatability.

Anthony Codispoti : It may sound like a weird question, but do you guys get involved in lobbying at all? It seems like if there were sort of some government regulations that says this needs to be tested or certified that that would be sort of good for business?

Doug Vail: We don’t, but it’s actually something we’ve thought about that maybe down the road if we get to a size, I mean, we’re 100 million plus right now, but at some point in time it probably does make sense. Regulation certainly is our friend and the more regulation there is on these types of inspections, the more volume of work that there is for us.

But we haven’t had to do that yet, but at some point in time there will be a need for that. And when you look at kind of our energy independence here in the United States and what we’re trying to get and what that means for manufacturing in the automotive world, those kinds of things matter. But where they make the decisions to deliver or the requirements of the government puts around what they want to have, yeah, those things certainly lend itself to great opportunities for companies like ours.

Anthony Codispoti : So across all these different acquisitions that you’ve been a part of or come in after the fact and had to sort of help with the integration, kind of curious to hear maybe what you’ve learned about integrating different teams, different cultures, different skill sets under sort of one unified vision.

Doug Vail: It’s not always easy. In fact, it’s never perfect. You have a vision of what it should be like. You try to put the right people in the right seats on the bus so that we’re all heading in the same direction. But inevitably you sometimes discover that that individual isn’t right for that particular role and either you try to get them into the right seat or you may have to part ways. It’s never the outcome that you desire. But I don’t know that we’ve done one where there wasn’t even the slightest bit of carnage that comes in the wake. And it’s a tough pill to swallow because you think you do all the right things and you’ve done enough work to not have that happen.

But it’s still that we have. And sometimes it might be as simple as just that individual was frustrated that the company got sold, that they thought that they had a better career path with the company being held by the old owners, you know, whatever it might be. And sometimes they’re just stinkers and you’ve got to kind of cut bait and move on in some cases. But I also think that the one thing that I’ve learned is similar to when you’re hiring sales and marketing professionals, you really take your time to hide, you know, to do what you can to feel confident that they’re doing it. But you take some time, you kind of hire slow.

This is a great day of quote, unquote, hire slow and fire fast. If they’re not getting it done, you know, early on in their career with you, it’s probably not going to be something that’s going to happen. Or they’re going to suck up so much energy that we’re going to be losing in other areas because it’s taken up so much of our time to help that person try to be successful. And it’s, again, probably best just to cut bait and try to find somebody else to fill that particular role.

Anthony Codispoti : What other strategies do you have when it comes to recruiting good folks? And then when you found the good ones, making sure you hold on to them?

Doug Vail: Yeah, one of the things I started doing before I actually got to IAA, looking for looking for sales professionals is I would put them in a selling situation. I’d give them a very brief outline of like, Hey, here’s what we want to cover.

Do you mind putting together a PowerPoint presentation and standing in front of a, you know, a group of in this case, it would be interviewers and just kind of talk about yourself, present yourself, present what you’re about, talk a little bit about how you go to market, like what’s make you successful. And in the context of that, we have found that we’re pretty, pretty good on finding the right types of folks that fit us culturally, which is kind of a big thing. You can kind of see how they, the dynamic of how they interact with the hiring team. And then you also kind of get them in a situation where salespeople generally, the good ones don’t like talking about themselves. And you kind of tell that they don’t, they’re much more comfortable talking about a product or a service than they are themselves. But you kind of, you kind of get through that and you, but it’s been, it’s been really helpful.

And those, those things will take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour in general, just get getting through really four or five pieces of topics. And, but it’s been, it’s been a great, it’s been a great context of hiring and finding people that will, will fit what you’re trying to build long term.

Anthony Codispoti : Now, Doug, I understand that you are obviously more heavily focused on sales and marketing side of things. But if we kind of zoom out and look at the, the big picture of the company, 20 some entities, got to be several hundred employees.

How do, how do they sort of break down? You know, you’ve got sales and marketing, you’ve got, I don’t know, other white collar admin, some field staff, maybe some blue collar, like what’s that kind of landscape look like?

Doug Vail: Yeah. So we’re just over about 750 employees. We’re fairly lean on the admin side. I mean, sales professionals, my sales and marketing’s 20 people. When you look at the operations leadership, it’s probably about 20-ish strong as well.

Finance is 10-ish. And then you have, like you say, in the admin and the, in the real work where it’s done. So our field technicians, I’m going to say we’re up over 500 right now that

Anthony Codispoti : are- These are the people out there like doing the actual testing.

Doug Vail: They’re either, they’re either in a lab doing the testing or they’re out there in the field doing the testing. And yeah, I think with a service business like ours and industrial service, and they’re really like any of them, and anybody will tell you this too, is we get reminded every time we buy a company, the most important part of this business is the guys that are doing the work or the guys that are doing the work. And we’re like, we fully understand that and we value that. And it’s very important to us that we, that we build relationships with them. And I don’t know that up until we began doing tech conferences where we were going to different geographies across the country and having these field guys that rarely get together ever because they’re always out, you know, they’re working 50 weeks out of the year and they don’t get together. But we started getting them together for two or three days and trying to learn and meet more, meet them and learn more about them as people because we don’t have a business if those people aren’t a feel valued, feel important, or part of what we do.

But knowing that they are the most important things that to this business is success today and tomorrow. So we do that now regularly every year. And then of course, as I mentioned earlier, go just go into the labs and being present there as leaders and talking with everybody that’s involved there and letting them know how important what they do is and trying to help them have a better experience every day than that’s what we do. I mean, I think that’s leadership 101.

Anthony Codispoti : Take a step back. I wanted to ask this question earlier and then we just kind of got into some interesting stuff. But how did the opportunity for you to join IIA first come about? You’ve had kind of a long story career, lots of different companies. Why IIA for you?

Doug Vail: I was working for actually an environmental company here in the Atlanta area, pretty high growth business as well. And I’d stayed in touch with a former colleague of mine who was thinking about taking this role on as the CEO of Industrial Inspection Analysis. And he called and asked me if I would be a reference, which I thought was kind of peculiar. And I said, sure. And then he ended up he called me and said, Hey, do you mind doing a phone interview with one of the principles here at the ownership company? And I was like, yeah, no problem. So I he called me like to the guy called me like 10 minutes later and I talked to him for, I don’t know, 45 minutes on the side of the road.

Actually, I pulled over so I could talk with him and I said, five minutes after I got done, my friend, my colleague, former colleague, called me back, goes, how’d it go? I go, I really have no idea, man. I don’t know how that went. This guy was really tough read for me and I’m generally pretty good at that. But I don’t know. I really don’t, man.

But good luck, you know. And turns out, he called me about an hour later or actually it was the next day and said, they’re going to let me give me the offer. And I was like, that’s fantastic. And then about a week after he started, he called me and said, we need a chief revenue officer.

Do you want to do this? And having spent a little bit of time, you know, kind of preparing for what this call was going to be out. I said, this is the kind of company I want to do. And he and I share a very similar kind of opinion about IIA, which is the things that we do every day affect lives and save lives in a lot of cases. And so we try to keep that message from center to our people that, you know, this isn’t just a test. This isn’t just an inspection. This is, you know, the ability to protect lives. So having the ability to provide really a safety umbrella to a litany of different industries and people has been a blessing. And I think he and I both appreciate that so much. And so that’s it. I mean, since 2020, when we basically started here, it’s been a pretty good partnership.

Anthony Codispoti : So I want to talk now about TRIR, total recordable incident rate. Can you explain to me what it is? Because I understand you guys have recorded a 0.00 TRIR, which is either the absolute worst it could be or the absolute best it could be.

Doug Vail: Thank you. Yeah, I don’t know if it was the worst thing, but yeah. So TRIR, as most people in the industrial world understand, is a number that is provided based on the number of incidents, recordable incidents you would have, safety incidents that your company has divided by 250,000 man hours. And so to have a zero, you literally have to have zero incidents over the course of time. And I think the one that you might have seen was a full calendar year that we had a 0.00. So 2024, we were able to complete without having any incidents. But I just found out actually last week that we’ve completed now two calendar years. So from February to end of February to end of February, we went two years without having a recordable. So that’s me knocking on wood.

It’s not luck though. The answer to the question is always like, well, how do y’all do that? And I was just at a meeting with customer in Ohio earlier this week, and they were like, that’s impressive. And even theirs is impressive.

They were like a 0.2. And I’m like, man, that’s phenomenal. And in our industries that we serve, if you’re at a one or higher, you kind of get blackballed from being able to do anything. So for us to maintain zero is great. And it’s just a testament to the leadership’s commitment to it.

And then our frontline folks, the people that are boots on the ground, paying attention every day, looking out for one another, doing the daily kind of walk and talk about safety. I think all those things are just become inherent to your culture. And but frankly, it none of it would matter if the C-suite didn’t talk about it, promote it, live by it, expect it, and then make sure that we’re constantly communicating that throughout the organization.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s really impressive. Are there maybe some unique technologies or processes that you guys have introduced that help you not only maintain that safety, but also just to stay ahead of the competition in terms of what it is that you’re able to offer?

Doug Vail: Yeah, I don’t know about technology, Anthony. I don’t think there’s really any, there’s no magic bullet to it. And I think there’s ways of tracking and measuring. The first thing that we employed was if you have any kind of an injury or incident, no matter how small it might be, you need to let a supervisor know within 30 minutes. In fact, that became the CEO is going to find out about it in 30 minutes.

He better. Or there’s going to be ramifications. And when we started doing that, there was still this sort of reluctance. You know, a lot of bad behaviors over the course of some of these folks’ careers have been doing this thing for 20 years, much longer than we’ve owned them, much longer than been part of the team.

But they just weren’t used to communicating every little thing that happened. But because of that, we were able to see where there might be an opportunity to improve our focus on a specific task so that we could make sure that thing doesn’t happen again. We don’t want that ever to happen to anybody because the next one could be much more severe to be the individual and certainly the organization as a whole. So being able to have that expectation that you’re going to notify the right people and then we’re going to dig into that incident and we’re going to try to find out why, why, why, right the old root cause analysis and being able to drill into those things.

I think that is kind of how most big companies or how much our industrial companies are successful is treating any little incident with real severity, critical thought, and then trying to make sure we can do whatever we can to not let that happen again to somebody else.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to shift gears back into kind of what’s more of your focus as the chief revenue officers, the sales, the marketing. You know, I think of a business like yours that’s primarily B2B serving other businesses. And I immediately go to, oh, this is probably, you know, a lot of lunches and dinners and, you know, shaking hands and, you know, showing up with coffee and donuts. But I’m curious, is there any level of being able to leverage any digital marketing strategies to sort of extend your reach? Yeah.

Doug Vail: So we’ve learned a lot over the course of the, you know, the five years having been here. We try a lot of different things. And I think the big thing we recognize back in 2022, this is, you know, coming out of COVID and try to deal with a world, a marketplace that, you know, for almost two years, we’re basically saying we’re not doing any face to face meetings, right? Like, don’t come here, you can’t come in. I mean, we had customers that were basically shutting the gates and they weren’t having their whole teams come in. So we had, I had to adapt. I had to learn because I’m a hand-to-hand combat guy.

I like looking people in the eyes, shaking their hands, telling them what we’re going to deliver, how we’re going to deliver it, and building that confidence just based on my confidence with them. And when you’re through a computer like you and I are doing right now, it’s not that. And it requires a little bit different skill set development. So we had to work on that. And we spent a lot of time at the initial stages of COVID practicing, delivering, you know, and communicating through a computer. But then beyond that, we also recognized that we need to ramp up our digital marketing world and social media continues to be a big player and tick-tock and all these other things.

And we needed some help. And so we’ve gone out and hired a full-time digital marketer and she’s been amazing. And we went from a director of marketing who knew a lot about it, but was overwhelmed with how much she, content she could deliver. And now we’ve got somebody that’s focused on it solely and studies the metrics and is always looking for the next angle.

And she’s done an amazing job. So, but yeah, we had to do a lot of that. In fact, we don’t have a sales team for all the lab services we do. It’s 40% of our business and all the lab services that we provide. We focus solely on digital marketing to grow the customer base and keep them informed and cross-selling do all these things. And it’s the returns have been pretty amazing with new customer accounts and reactivation of old accounts and cross-selling services, service line to service line has been really, really amazing. I don’t know that we could have predicted it would have been as good as it has. And the hard part is keeping it up, keeping that pace up. But it’s been pretty awesome the last two years.

Anthony Codispoti : So, as much as you’re comfortable and as much as you’re sort of aware of the nuts and bolts, I’d be curious to dig in a little bit more. Because I, you know, I think of B2B and I think of, again, sort of like, just like you said, hand-to-hand combat, you’re sort of there in person. So it’s really impressive to me to hear how well the digital strategy is working for you. But then my mind immediately goes to, oh, well, if they’re targeting other businesses, probably primarily linked in is their mode of outreach.

But I heard you throw out, you know, like TikTok and, you know, some of the other social media platforms that I would traditionally think of as, hey, I’ve got a backpack to sell or a new hairbrush or that kind of a thing, not like an industrial testing service. So correct me. Tell me why my thinking is sort of outdated. Well, you’re not.

Doug Vail: We do. We do quite a bit in LinkedIn. A lot of promotion goes on there. We just don’t limit it to that. We put similar posts in, you know, old people, social media like Facebook, Instagram, places like that, X.

We generate, you know, little video blurbs of different testing that goes on. So, but I would say the bulk of our digital marketing is truly, you know, Google ads, going to the different search engines and ascertaining how well our digital keywords and things like that are performing and then going, that one doesn’t have any runway. We’re either calling it the wrong thing or we need to, you know, figure out some other means to promote. But I would say that our digital marketer Renee spends a good bit of her time kind of in that free space.

It’s not free, but it’s, you know, it’s kind of like that’s where the general population is going to go look for a potential supplier. So when we look at our rankings, it’s trying to maintain that position of one, two or three. So it’s on the first page and in those kinds of things. And since we have elevated ourselves from way down the third page to generally speaking on the first page of a search result, we’re certainly getting a heck of a lot more clicks and interest and opportunity to work with companies that we never heard of. And they turn out to be really good fits for what we do as an as an organization. And we never would have found them probably driving down the street looking for something because it’s companies you would never hear of. But they’re large companies that supply a really diverse and market base.

And they’re they’re really, really good at what they do, whatever that little element of manufacturing is that they do. We’ve somehow found them. And it’s it’s crazy to think about actually when you when you get right down to how many customers we have added in markets, we have penetrated that way.

Anthony Codispoti : So it sounds like Google ads, probably like some SEO that that’s sort of that free space in Google. That’s helped a lot. But are you also finding since it sounds like your digital marketer is great at sort of tracking all the data, are you finding that people are coming from content that you’ve posted on places like Tiktok and Instagram? And Facebook and actually coming into your funnel and becoming customers?

Doug Vail: That’s a really good question. I don’t know that I don’t know that I’ve looked at the detail there. I suspect that my marketing director looks at that quite a bit. We’re pretty predictable when it comes to what’s working. Let’s do more of it. You know, and what’s not, let’s maybe course correct a little bit. That part of it, I don’t have to mention any longer.

It’s sort of become part of their their DNA and it’s what they do every day. So I would probably freak out a little bit if I saw some decline in performance, but I haven’t seen it yet. So we said it’s something we don’t worry about.

And I would think, feel very confident that both the director of marketing and our digital marketer, if they ever felt like they were kind of at wit’s end and something was really frustrating that they would raise their hand. Because it’s again, that’s just kind of the culture we’ve created that let’s talk about it before it becomes an issue that would surprise a lot of people. And so you have a lot of open and candid conversations about those kinds of things.

Anthony Codispoti : What does future growth look like for you guys, Doug? Yeah, more acquisitions. Is it new types of advertising, new services? Where’s your head on that?

Doug Vail: Yeah, I think that’s the kind of like kind of going back to the beginning of the conversation. And it’s definitely going to be a combination of organic growth. It’s definitely going to be a combination of new acquisitions where the service kind of limits are.

I’m not sure. And that’s probably the most exciting thing is we literally just bought a company that operates in Canada in the U.S. That does fuel lubricant and oil testing. I never would have thought about that until I looked at their company website and saw some of their customers and I would go, oh man, that’s just like our lift group. Like, we should go do that. And then I started talking to our own people and like, oh yeah, yeah, we actually do that for several customers.

We’ll get samples out of their trucks and then we’ll send them to a lab and they pay us like something for it. And I’m like, how many of those would we do? And they’re like, not many. I’m like, okay.

So it was that kind of thing. Like until you explore broader, you’re not, you’re going to probably miss some good ones. But I would say we’re going to, we’re probably going to stay pretty comfortable here in North America, Canada and the U.S. There’s a lot of consolidation going on in the tick space, the texting inspection certification and compliance world. So there’s lots of these little lab service companies, field service companies that probably make a lot of sense for us to go look at. And so we’ve got a whole team that is out there trying to find those adjacent spaces or complementary companies to what we do. And likely it’s a lot of the same serviceable markets because they’re pretty desirable, pretty predictable. And they tend to perform better through the cycle of economic fluctuation that we have experienced over the course of the last, you know, five to six years here. So, but those are the kinds of companies we admire.

We don’t, we don’t do, we’re very lucky. We don’t do like fix it projects. We’re not trying to take a company that’s, you know, leak and oil and try to make it something great. We’ve been, we’ve been really focused on buying well, you know, high performing, high growth companies that would fit into the world of tick for us.

Anthony Codispoti : And that’s what we say. If there’s somebody listening who’s maybe getting towards the end of their career and they’re thinking, hey, this might be a good time to exit. The good fits for you guys would be.

Doug Vail: I think companies that serve precision manufacturing that do testing inspection for precision manufacturing. So, as I mentioned, aerospace, medical, defense, Department of Defense, a lot of government work. I mean, we’re, we’re part of a very small organ team that is building submarine parts for the U.S. Navy out and doing it with 3D printing. We’re like the testing group. We’re helping qualify procedures and inspection methodologies for those parts so that when we start 3D printing all these parts across the country by different suppliers, the quality control aspects of it have been defined by us with these manufacturing partners. So that kind of stuff is pretty cool, but we’re looking for companies that can help us, you know, obviously grow in what we serve our customer base with. So that just adjacent space, if they’ve got some services that are testing inspection related, we’d love to talk to those folks because it’s, we know that our customers need it. And having a one-stop shop or one-stop solution provider, there’s great value in that.

Anthony Codispoti : Doug, what’s a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life? Sales.

Doug Vail: So, I guess the story goes like this. I was, I was in my role for about nine months. And I had gotten a new boss and he had been over in Europe and was just crushing it over there. Basically doing the same thing I was doing.

And we were selling this automated welding concept and high precision corrosion resistant welding. And he goes, I want to go on the road with you. And I’m like, great, let’s go.

And so we’ll go down to sunny Florida, you know, we’ll knock it around down there. Well, I didn’t, I didn’t prepare very well, Anthony, and it showed in the quality of the meetings that we had, it showed in the results of the meetings. And as he was, he was basically heading to go visit some family down there. And he dropped me off at the airport so I could fly home and he got out of the car and he says, maybe this just isn’t for you. And kind of hurt my soul. And when I got home, I talked to my wife and told her what he said.

And it was interesting because I didn’t, I never got mad about it because I was like, it felt like that hit home. And so I, I told my wife and she said, Have you really given this all you got because you’re not one to fail like everything that I’ve ever seen you attempt to do. You’ve always been good at and been successful with. And that’s not just the work world, but just kind of things in general.

And I that kind of hit home too. And so I kind of had a weekend there where I contemplated, does this what I want to continue to do? And can I, can I do this and be successful? And I quickly decided that I needed to think about sales much differently. I needed to come up with a more robust plan on how I am going to run my day and what that’s going to look like. And so being an engineer, it was easy to sort of say, this has got to be a process. There’s a process to this and the successful guys always have a process.

And so, and then man, you know, fast forward 15 years and Nick Savins saying the same thing, right? It’s kind of weird. But, but like all those things I started, you know, trying to qualify and define what it was.

And I spent a lot of time just crafting out what this needs to look like on a daily basis and what I’m doing with my time and how I’m preparing for meetings and started scheduling my time out. Not, not kind of the week before. And here’s where I’m going to go call next week. I mean, I was planning six weeks to six months going, I’m going to be flying down there to Orlando and I’m going to, you know, here’s that week I’m going to spend. And then as I’m doing that, I’m realizing this preparation piece is now helping me be really prepared for any kind of customer meetings. And so that’s that sort of strategic view of selling and then executing on a process was the life changer. And now, you know, six companies later and 25 years later, the process is something that I can share with not only, you know, new sales professionals, but people that have been doing it for 10 and 15 years. And they’re like, yes, that’s what it is. That’s why it is this way. And that’s how I could be more successful than I’ve been.

And in some cases for guys that have been really successful, but now they’re kind of taking it to the next level of success and growth in their own professional career. So, but that was it. It was just kind of an aha moment that got kicked me in the head. And I took it from there as something to do. And I guess it worked out.

Anthony Codispoti : So what can you share? What can you share with the audience about this, this process that you’ve developed?

Doug Vail: Yeah, it’s so I, we’ve got a lot of sales people who are who listen to this, you know, what I’ll try to, I’ll try to, yeah, I try to break it down pretty simply, but it’s, it’s, it’s again, it’s what the conversation that I can have with anybody on my team has got to do with who we call the six ours with the six rights. And it’s making sure that you’ve got the right targets.

You know who they are in your world. And if it’s a thousand, well, let’s break it down to the best 200 and that we’re going to try to get to this year. Like the account universe for the for tick is so big because everybody needs a little bit of it and some people need a lot of it.

And so you, you’ve got to kind of prioritize all those targets. And then you’ve got in our, in the case of our sales guys who run different regions, you know, they’ve got different pockets in there where there’s a lot of manufacturing here. There’s a lot of line contractors there. There’s fire departments everywhere and we service the, we’re lucky we’re, we’ve, we’ve serviced the fire departments up and down the East Coast and we’re trying to grow that business. But so there’s never a shortage of targets. It’s really about where you’re going to put your priorities, but all that right target thing is the first thing. The second piece is the second R is the right audience and who do you, who are you talking with and who is going to see value in what you’re providing and who are the decision makers for those kinds of things.

That’s not new news. Everybody who every sales thing that I’ve ever seen talks about making sure you know who the decision influencers are. But making sure you’re meeting with them on a basis and not just meeting with any, you know, any Joe Schmoe in the business is important and you need to hold yourself accountable to making sure that you’re connecting with that right audience and not just an audience. The third thing is the right message. And I think in general you have one shot of making an impression with somebody and you want to, you want to put your best foot forward. And so making sure that the message that you’re going to deliver not only you’re comfortable with and confident with, but is also something that’s going to relate to value, perception of value on their end or something at least they want to explore. And if you can get that customer to commit to I need to hear more than you’ve won. If you get through your pitch and they’re kind of like thanks for coming in, you need to refine your message. You need to work on what that is or you missed the mark in what you thought was a value to that customer.

Why? Again, that’s sort of the self reflection, self accountability, holding yourself to not letting failures like that go without being some level of improvement going forward. And then we talk about the right proposal. There’s got to be a document that says here’s what we’re going to deliver for you, Mr. Customer, and here’s what your expectations are on that.

So there’s got to be the right kind of proposal that not only resonates what message you provided earlier, but now has some commercial offering to it. The right closure strategy. Who do we need to involve in the organization to be successful in closing this deal? And how do we align our safety guy with their safety guy and our quality guy with their quality guy and their chief financial officer with our chief financial officer? You know, however that is, is do we have the organization, our organization, align with theirs and can we have communication with them? And then the last thing, which is one of the most important things to me, and it’s again, none of these are really in any kind of order, but the right customer commitment, which means whatever you have done up to a point in this sale, if you have not gotten that customer to commit to some action to move closer to evaluating our organization, then there’s something that’s broken somewhere along the line too. So having a customer commit to visiting one of our labs, go into a job site and seeing us in action, watching us go do a full fledged inspection of a vehicle, demonstrating that capability, that experience, that expertise to that customer. If we don’t get that shot, then somewhere along the line, again, we’ve missed the message, we’ve missed the audience or we’ve missed, we’re talking to the wrong type of target.

So all those things kind of wadded together are what I have taken everywhere I have gone since 2020 and it’s been fairly effective. And the one message I always tell a new hire is until you value your time, nobody else ever will. And so don’t let customers bully you into, you know, come next week.

I need to see you next week. Unless it’s a quality issue, then we got to do, we got to do, but, but I never like a guy on my team that doesn’t have three weeks of packed time. I want him to be scheduled with customers for four or five weeks out if possible. And if a customer calls and says, hey, can you come out here next week? If you say, yeah, more than you’re saying no, it’s probably a problem. You’re not going to be super successful long term.

Anthony Codispoti : But why is that? Is it just because they don’t have enough in their pipeline or that you feel like you’re sending the signal that you’re too needy or what philosophy there?

Doug Vail: Are you asking about the, why would the customer say that? Or why would I say, why would I expect that from my guy? The second. Okay. The reason I expect that from my guys is that if they’re waiting, if they have availability in the middle of next week, for example, then I feel like they haven’t been planning and preparing enough to fill their own schedule. And if we’re waiting for customers to call us to fill in our schedule, we are never going to get out ahead of it enough to where our funnel is going to be satisfactory for us to deliver on our objectives, financial or otherwise. And so if they have, if they are booking themselves two and three weeks, I’m not opposed to telling a customer, I can’t be there, but I can get somebody to come there, give me an idea what the context of the meeting would be. Because otherwise, I’m going to be in your area and they can look at their great plan and go, I’m going to be back in your area in five weeks.

Can it wait till then? If the customer might go, oh yeah, yeah, it’s no problem. And sometimes, and other times are like, no, I need somebody out here next week. And that’s when my guys would pick up the phone and go, they’d call me, they’d call the CEO if they have to, the COO, we will find somebody to support that particular meeting somehow, some way, if that’s what needs to be done. But from a sales perspective, you always want to have a much more full schedule in and of your time.

And that’s why I say, if you don’t value your time and you let the customers kind of push you around, it’s going to be really tough to be consistently successful in anything that you end up doing in sales. That makes sense. It’s pretty simple.

Anthony Codispoti : So beyond your professional life, Doug, you’re also known for founding Emma’s Ambassadors. Yeah. Which support children with autism. Yes. Tell me why this is so important to you.

Doug Vail: Yeah, thanks. So when my daughter was two, she was diagnosed with autism. And of course, there’s a lot of what was mean and what does that mean. And back then, I think that the number was one in about 342 kids had autism. So we were one of them. I was, I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a great career. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve pretty financially set.

I don’t struggle for much. But as I was looking around at some of these other kids in our area that were diagnosed with autism and they were in the public school system or even somewhere in a private setting, private school setting. You could just tell they just weren’t able to get what they needed. And from either a therapeutic standpoint, being getting through the right therapies, having equipment in their school that would help them be more comfortable and relaxed in a challenging environment with, you know, hundreds of other kids around that are typical. So, so we founded this with the idea that we’re going to raise money and try to get it to the schools and the families that are affected by autism. And over the course of, you know, now it’s been 19 years, we’ve raised and basically given away about $400,000. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about, you know, $1,000 iPad here or outfit in the school with, you know, $20,000 worth of therapeutic equipment to try to help these kids be a little bit more comfortable.

It’s been pretty impressive. So we do a one annual fundraiser a year, although we accept donations year round. We do one big annual fundraiser a year, which is a golf tournament at the end of April up here where I’m just outside of Atlanta. And we sell out every year and the first year was a struggle and then we’re having our 15th golf tournament this year.

We call it our 15th anniversary. And yeah, and we sold out the golfing spots 128 spots in less than three weeks. So great community support, got lots of friends and family that support the event and we’re blessed.

And the funds that we raise goes directly back into helping these families up here. They’ve all seen a lot of them. A lot of my friends have seen Emma grow up. She’s now 21.

She’s still autistic, but hasn’t changed. And so now we’re kind of looking at our foundation and what are we going to do now for the future because helping the younger kids has been sort of something we’ve put a lot of time and energy into. And now we’re looking at, you know, some of these kids becoming adults and like what is their world look like and what can we be doing maybe to help better that adult life, if you will.

And so always something gears turning things like that to where we go next. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been very rewarding for my wife and I. And yeah, we look forward to what helping out there’s out in North Georgia.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s really cool. I’m here in Columbus, Ohio. My wife is a speech therapist in low income school district. And she works primarily with preschool kids. And so the last several years I’ve heard her get both excited and frustrated with trying to outfit more kids with communication devices, which I think is part of what your funds raised have gone to, especially kids who aren’t nonverbal, having trouble, you know, forming words, how can they communicate through these sort of souped up iPads that have, you know, different buttons and icons and things that make it easy for them to, to communicate. She’s really excited about this and then also really frustrated sometimes that they can’t get funding or approval for the funding. And so what you’re talking about, my wife, she doesn’t really watch my shows. I think she’ll watch this part of it and she’ll really appreciate what it is that you’re doing.

Doug Vail: Fair enough. I appreciate that. And we actually, we actually had out a lot and it’s pretty interesting that Apple and the developers of their different apps, they’re starting to get to where there’s really, really good software for an iPad. And we provide a lot of those to kids because most of them, that’s unfortunate, they have to leave the device at school. They can’t take it home. And so they’re really ineffective when they get home and there’s that frustration for the parent and we’ve lived through it. We’ve been there. So being able to allow them to have the same equipment while they’re at home and what a phenomenal life improvement for those kids and their families.

Anthony Codispoti : One more question for you, Doug. Before I do it, I want to do two things. First of all, for everyone listening today, I would invite you to hit the follow, like, share, subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you can continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Doug Bale. Doug, I also want to let people know the best way to either continue to follow your story or to get in touch with you directly. What would that be?

Doug Vail: Yeah, I’m easy to find in LinkedIn. It’s Doug Bale, V-A-I-L, like Bale, Colorado, one. And if you just type in Doug Bale, one, it should pop up and find me. There’s a surprise. There’s more and more Doug Bales now, Douglises and whatnot in LinkedIn, but I like to think I’m one of the first ones.

Anthony Codispoti : Bunch of imposters.

Doug Vail: We’ll make sure we include a link to the correct one in the show notes here. Thank you. Perfect. Yeah, that’s good. Last question for you, Doug. As you look to the future, and you could take this either from an industry standpoint or the business, what are some of the exciting changes that are coming? Yeah, I am kind of an old school guy, as I mentioned, I like the pressing of the flesh, but you’d have to be stuck under a rock if you’re not thinking about how AI can affect your business.

I’m actually dabbling with it a little bit with my own nonprofit at MS Ambassadors to help deliver more routine content that I don’t have to sit and develop. I think that’s one of the things that can be kind of debilitated is paralysis through analysis and not just keeping up with a really rapid churn. So I think how AI affects sales and marketing in the future is going to be incredible. And then as I’m partners with our COO Jason and he and I are always talking about these little angles and I’ll go, yeah, this AI thing. And then he’ll be like, yeah, I need to look at AI and how it’s going to affect our operations too.

And I’m like, yeah. We just got kind of into this world of power BI business information and how fast we can get reports that used to take us hours to put together and now they’re at our fingertips. Like the speed of business information and making decisions is getting so quick that it helps really stay ahead of the competition, your markets that you serve, all that stuff is just the world of information is just getting aggressive. And I think it’s going to be healthy. But if you’re if you’re not paying attention to it’s going to be a real challenge in the next five to 10 to keep up.

Anthony Codispoti : Doug, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. This was fun. Thanks for having me. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.