Accunet Ambassadors | Andy Schlater | Secure Fire & Safety

🔥🔥🔥 In this episode, hosts **David Wickert** and **Tim Holdmann** sit down with **Andy Schlater**, Vice President of Sales at **Secure Fire & Safety**. 

Get ready for insights, laughs, and a behind-the-scenes look at how relationships fuel success in the mortgage and safety industries.

💬 Learn what makes Andy tick, why trust and community matter, and how Secure Fire & Safety keeps businesses protected—without burning out the fun.

#AccunetAmbassadors #BlueButtonBroadcast #SecureFireAndSafety #MortgageTalk #BusinessLeadership

Transcript

Welcome to the Blue Button Broadcast. This is the Acunet Ambassadors Show. My name is David Wickert. I'm the president and managing owner at Acunet Mortgage. Joined today by my co-host, Mr. Tim Holdman, vice president, senior loan consultant, also managing owner. I think we're going to try to find four or five more titles to put on Tim's email signature as well. And today we are joined by Mr. Andy Schlater, who is the Vice President of Sales at Secure Fire and Safety. Husband, brother, father of, is it three babies? Three, yes. You're a very fertile man. And managing owner to boot. Andy, thanks for carving out a couple minutes for us. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys. I've got an icebreaker just because it's that time of year. And I'll go first because my wife, I'm taking my wife to State Fair on Saturday. Good. And both for the people, I'm taking her, but also we are attending people watching at the State Fair, really. So my two questions for all of us, one, when you go to State Fair, what do you eat? And then two, what music do you see? So for me, I try to always get a corn on the cob right there. Is that from the Lions booth? Lions Club. Yeah, the butter dipped corn on the cob. With all of the stuff sprinkled on it, too. Like it's not just it's not corn. yeah it's not corn it's a butter salt delivery stick and then i and then i'm seeing a country band over the weekend so that's what i see tim what's your what are you eating what music do you see oh so grace and i are definitely going to the fair with the kids we might go a second time just the two of us for a little date night but my wife always has to get the dill pickle pizza that is a must every year wow um I've been looking at the Sporky's finalist list already, and I got my eye on the Brat Wantons, I think that they're called. Wow. Is that new? That'll be on my short list. I think that's one of the new ones this year. The Brat Wantons? Worth giving it a shot anyways. Amazing. No specific music acts that we really want to see. We're just going to walk around, and there's always one or two good cover bands. Yeah. either, you know, eighties hair metal or, or a good country cover band. Either of those will, you know, get my bucket list going. So. Andy. All right. What about, what about you? You got to go straight for the Krispy Kreme cheeseburger every time. Sounds horrible. Rocked every time. So. that's what I'm going for. And, uh, as Tim said, I've just, you go around and you just find what feels right at that time. So country, heavy metal, whatever it is. Yeah. We'll go. And that's what we go for. Right. Do you just like not eat for like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, yeah for recovery i could see like a sweet a sweet savory combo working you know like i feel like that would that would jive pretty good no it's good i advise give it a try don't knock until you try it so check that out all right andy so um if tim and i have the pleasure of competing against our frenemies at landmark and associated bank Who in the fire protection world do you get the pleasure of competing against doing what you do? Yeah. A lot of good companies out there. We compete against Ahern, Johnson Controls, Action Fire, Cintas. So a lot of people in our market, a lot of big name players, some small ma and pas. And then you have a couple of middle ground guys like us that work hard every day to take care of our customers and continue to grow our base. I make the joke all the time, especially with some of our real estate friends. I'm like, I need these banks to stick around because they're kind of like completely what's less than mediocre, but better than terrible, like lackluster. They're just like not good at what they do. And so it just points out that we are good at what we do. Do you, when you're consulting with clients, do you enjoy hearing their opinions? horror stories of trying to call an eight hundred number when they need something? You know, you hear the good and the bad with everything. What I like to tell them is, you know. Kind of leading into your first question here, but, you know, I always tell people to, you know, if you want to work with someone local, a good family business, my priority is to give you good service. I'm available day and night. You can call me. You can call our office. You'll always be connected with a member of our team. So we like to let our service speak for itself, our customer service, and let our customers out there make their own decision. You're a diplomat. I appreciate that about you. You're a political answer. I respect that. Because I think my prompt to you just on the whole local element, when I was trying to relay a couple of the questions that I thought would be good for our conversation, the one I think I'm going to paraphrase what I had sent you. When you're talking about fire protection, I think especially in a commercial setting or a manufacturing setting, you're talking about inventory, like things in a warehouse that if you own the building and want to sell those things to your end customers, oh, if you have ten million dollars worth of stuff in your factory, hey, business owner, what do you think is an appropriate amount of protection to make sure that your building doesn't burn to the ground and do two things. One, all of your inventory burns to the ground and two, you probably don't have a business anymore because you don't have inventory anymore. So I guess, is that how you approach the consulting element in fire protection? Yes, so very good question. Hopefully we don't get yelled at for copyright, but I think the answer to that is it's priceless. Obviously the ten million dollars worth of inventory, major issue. But you know, here at Secure Fire, our goal is total compliance on fire and life safety systems. So in the event something bad does happen, you're complying with the fire department, you're complying with your insurance companies. You really should have no problem in recovery. I didn't even think of the insurance part, right? Like, oh, yeah, you want the insurance company to cut you a check so that you can have inventory again? God, I hope you followed Andy's advice then, right? Yep. So we inspect to all the NFPA codes regularly. Fire departments and insurance companies can supersede those codes, but we always make sure that your building is compliant so you have peace of mind at night when you put your head on your pillow that not only your business, your property, and most importantly, all of your employees' livelihoods are protected. Yeah, you're right. I'm being selfish because I'm just describing the, oh, sorry, business owner, you're building burned down and you have no more inventory. It's like, let alone the people who are going to show up to work or not, who may or may not have jobs if you don't protect the inventory that you sell to make revenue to have a business. Absolutely. So I think, because you're kind of, you're getting at the difference between the type of inventory business operator who's just trying to check the box on yeah yeah yeah you know andy walked through here and he pointed out that this this and this versus thinking about it strategically right is it and i feel this way about some of our home buyer clients it's like hey do you think that protecting the place that you sleep at night is worth you know being smart about and not just like calling an eight hundred number because they had a good TV commercial. Sure. But do you feel is it a coin flip when you're on site between a box checker versus a more like an operator type? Yeah, you can certainly sniff out what I'll call a transactional customer that is looking to check that box. Yes. But, you know, my goal is to continue to grow our business to make sure that we're keeping property safe and i don't i mean transactional customers are great too um but my goal is to build relationships and have you know partners for life so we work really really hard every day to continue to have those customers trust us And, you know, we're not perfect. We'll make mistakes, but we always own up to it and fix it. So to answer your question, yes and no, I guess. So, yeah, but just like you guys, I mean, I'm sure you get calls all the time and people are feeling you out. And but, you know, for the right fit, we're the right fit. If not, we're not. And that's just how it works. Yeah. And I think I'm sure you'd agree, Andy, like it's so much more personally gratifying to have the customer who's views it more as a two way relationship with you as opposed to kind of that transactional type customer. And we will. This is a business, right? Like we'll help everybody who would like to be helped. But I know like, you know, from David and ours perspective, and I'm sure this is the same with with your business as well. It's like it's so much more enjoyable to do the work if your customer recognizes the value and what you're bringing to the table and views it more as like a long term relationship versus like. Absolutely. one and done, you know, like, check the box, okay, talk to you never, you know, type of situation. So, yeah. It's the talk to you never type. It's like, thanks, bye, have a nice... So, Andy, I'm just, like, the art of... Do you walk into a building? Are you, like... Like, you can't help not see all the things when you walk into a building? Like, you... Right, like it's invisible to the common person, but you walk into a building, you're like, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, on protection stuff. Yeah, no, my wife hates going out with me because we'll walk into a restaurant, into a building, and she's like, stop checking the fire extinguisher tags. But it's just ingrained in the back of my head. But yeah, always looking at it. Every commercial space is an opportunity for us. So someone's doing the fire protection, so why not us? But with that comes the passion, truly, of making sure buildings are compliant, properties are safe. so um a lot of the times i've called on people like hey your extinguishers are expired by two years and they're like we didn't even know we had to do that you know we just bought the building so a lot of my work comes from educational space as well educating my customers on what they have to do what the local codes um are and the national codes and what it takes for them to be compliant so Do you have like local fire chiefs on speed dial? Like are you, is that kinda, hey, did you guys walk into this space and they failed? Give me a call, I'll be happy to help them, right? Yeah, no, they're not on speed dial. Our goal is for the fire chiefs not to be calling our customers. So we get in on the front end, make sure that everyone is scheduled accordingly in the month that they're due for inspections. so that when the fire chief does come around they get a good clean of bill of health and another year and yeah i'm curious andy from a from a compliance standpoint like how often do those codes change or get adjusted because like in the mortgage world what what keeps our job fresh and interesting is like a lot of times the rule book changes sure and you know rules will go away or come back or be modified do you do you have something similar like that where you got to keep uh up to speed on codes or is it more like once they're set it's kind of what it is for the next you know twenty years type of thing yeah no great question um it's a, it changes, but not as fast as it should. So, um, sure. Most of the time it's around for about ten years and then there's minor changes, but the meat and potatoes of it usually stays pretty consistent. So nice. Okay. Do you, cause are you dealing with a combination of both new buildings and old buildings. And I got to imagine that they're, it's like, is it vanilla and chocolate? Like, oh, the new building, like it's up to code from the jump. But is it the old buildings where it's like, oh my gosh, I don't know if we're ever going to get this place okay. Yeah. And so there's obviously some grandfather clauses with that. But that's kind of the beauty of my world is, you know, we're in buildings that were built in the eighteen hundreds and then there's buildings that were built yesterday, different systems that all operate similarly yet differently. So we're really fortunate here at Secure. We have a great depth of employees that have been around for a long time and then some new guys here as well. So we really have all that experience covered to make sure that we're able to see those different types of systems and help our customers with some of those older obsolete systems that some companies may not have the employees that have that depth and experience to work on so. And I'm always curious because it's not like when you were in the seventh grade, did you write down like, and when I grow up, do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to work in fire protection and safety. And it's the same in mortgage. No one is just like... applying for college and like, and you know what I'm going to do when I'm all done? Mortgage banking. Is fire safety, it's one of those like, why not me? Yeah, good question. So I went to the college at University of Dayton and Didn't know what I wanted to do. But at the end of the day, I knew I was good with people and I liked working hard, had a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. So I worked for Phillips Sixty Six out of college in oil and gas and got to experience the big behemoth of a business and then worked for a smaller company in BSI in office interiors. And then my father and another partner started this business fourteen years ago. And there was an opportunity for me to jump on here. So really love it. Fire protection is the business, but I always say we're in the people business and taking care of people. And being a small business, we have the opportunity to to really dive in and take care of people. And if things aren't working, you know, we can change it tomorrow. We always joke, Hey, if tomorrow we want our trucks to be pink, guess what? They're going to be pink. So there's no red tape to jump through. Our focus is our customers and how we can take care of them and how we can innovate and grow and take care of our employees. So. So so we didn't share notes, but you kind of dovetail perfectly into the kind of the entrepreneurial side of this whole thing. You were so kind. You introduced me to one of your employees who, hey, you know what they want to do? Go out and buy a house. And I think the sign of a high quality leader or at least one of the signs is. either realizing or admitting to yourself that everyone who comes to work is just probably coming to work so that they can go back out into life and do the real life stuff that they want to do. Like buy a house, make babies, you know, go to state fair and see a band. So the, and actually funny enough, one of our Acuna coworkers is buying a house and it's like, oh my gosh, this is what we do. Like, yeah, she comes to work every day, but you know what she wants to do? She wants to go buy a house and do the thing. So I guess, do you feel in your role in managing people, is it unleashing or clearing the way so that your staff can have success at work, but so that they can go back out into life and like do what they actually want to do with their time? Yeah, a hundred percent. So like I said before, we're a family business and we love when people are buying cars, buying houses. And, you know, when you sit down with the kid across the table, it's eighteen years old and, you know, you ask him what he wants his life to look like in ten years and might be he might want to be managing people or he might just want to be a really good tech. Whatever that path is, the opportunity is here for them because we want to develop them within their role, but also as human beings. And, you know, whether it's you want to have a family or you need help with this or that, we really take pride in making this a good place to work. And then, you know, we really prioritize those people having an outside life and, you know, accomplishing those other goals as well. Am I crazy? But like, given the... the amount of potential clients who need fire protection and safety, it's like, I'm going to say unlimited. I'm going to say the word, but like, oh, are you hungry? Go out and do the thing. Right. And it's kind of the same in mortgage. Like, oh, you'd like to find success? Do it. Right. which is both awesome and terrifying, paralyzing sometimes. Yep. Um, so the one Tim and I, um, had a story that we wanted to share. And if Andy, if you would be our, um, listening public to a mortgage story, because we've been able to help your family, uh, as well as I'm going for a hundred percent market share in the greater Schleder family. Yeah. You're doing a pretty good job there, David. I appreciate that. That's why we keep coming back to you, man. But well, and so I got this text and I didn't throw my phone at Tim, but I like, I couldn't have put it in his face faster. to then share with Tim's team. But this is literally the text that I got. Hey, good morning. We are currently still holding off until interest rates chill out for a little bit. Hopefully we get some cuts, but fingers crossed, we still check out new listings from time to time, but right now we are just holding off. That's... description, the waiting client, Andy, I think what I in my make believe story, what I want to say is client, I want you to talk to Andy because Andy is on the other side of the of this story of the yeah, we're not going to wait. We're going to go live our life because. What I would share with that client is Well, Andy has a lower rate because he didn't wait. Yep. And has enjoyed a preposterous amount of home appreciation. Correct. In the time since he bought a house. Was it two years ago? I think two or three years ago now. Yeah. Wow. And it's just like... So just to just try to help. And this is where Tim jumps in and is just like, David, you can't you can't help people who aren't ready, even though I want them to be ready. Right, Tim? Yeah, I mean, you can't make someone's mind up for them. Right. And like. where we can literally do everything else is once someone makes the decision or like, okay, I want to go do this big life step, right. Of like buying a home and like Andy, you know, David shared a little bit of your history with me about when you bought your home and things. And it's just funny because like when the timing of when you bought rates had been much lower and then like they were majorly on the upswing, right. When you bought, you could have very easily been that person who was like, ah, I want to wait for rates to get lower, whatever that means, right? Because whenever we follow up and be like, well, how low do you want them to get? We never get a clear answer on that. We're just like, well, I want them lower than they are now. Zero. Yeah. Can I get that negative one percent? And, you know, I think you touched on this already. Like, it's an emotional decision. It really isn't data or fact based at all. And in your case, it turned out, I mean, you look like a genius right now, having done what you did, because you know, rates did not go down. And in fact, they've continued to just creep up a little bit higher than where they were when you bought. And you've gotten to live your life in your home for the last two years or three years, which is huge, right? Your family has grown. You haven't needed to rent. You know, you've had your own space. Are you glad you got that extra bedroom now? Is that, you're like... It would have been a little more interesting. It would have been a little tight. And your home is worth a shockingly higher value now than it was when you bought. So you've gained all that equity in your home having made the decision to buy. So it's like I'm just curious on like what you as a total non-mortgage person would say if that text that David shared was like from a family member or relative or even an employee of yours who's like, I just want wait, I want to wait for rates to get better because that's the reason that I'm choosing to say as to why I don't want to go out and buy a home. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I feel for that individual that texted to you, David, because I was that person for a while. But, you know, Just as people trust in me for what I do for a living, you need to surround yourself with good peoples, whether it's an agent that is qualified, a good mortgage broker. Because at the end of the day, listen to them. They're the pros in what they do. So trust in those people. And I selfishly was waiting for lower rates. Our house specifically, we had an opportunity to go after it. And we didn't do it right away. And that cost me probably a full point in interest. So if your heart's set on buying a house right now, you know, David and his team and Tim, you guys will help them get creative on it. There's different ways to do it. So trust in the pros and they'll help you figure it out. Well, and it's... The ongoing relationship, Tim, you had made note of what Andy had said. Of course, there's the transactional types of clients, but Andy, I'm sure you enjoy the ones who you get to check in with consistently. Buying the home is only chapter one in the book. Absolutely. You can't remodel the house you never closed on. Right. So you got to get into it first. And I'm sure it's the same with protection. It's just like, well, yeah. Oh, congratulations. Your business is growing. Pull me in on how we can make sure that you grow without risking any of what you're adding to your business. Right. A hundred percent. So what I gathered, Andy, is that David's client who texted him that just doesn't trust David enough, I think is what it comes down to. Yeah. He's just not ready yet. And I think they have a little one. The person who texted me, I think they have an under one-year-old. And I'm just waiting for them to have a good enough reason. Maybe like baby number two, let alone baby number three. Good. All right. Well, Andy, I appreciate you jumping on and kicking off the Acunet Ambassadors feed. Again, Vice President of Sales at SecureFire and Safety. Andy, real quick, do a plug of your business for anyone tuning into this podcast. Give us your thirty second plug for SecureFire. yes so secure fire and safety were based out of wauwatosa wisconsin um we specialize in fire and life safety inspections so fire extinguisher annual inspections kitchen systems pre-action systems sprinkler systems fire alarm systems install and monitoring emergency exit light and clean agent systems. So feel free to give us a call anytime at four one four two five seven four two two two. You can ask for myself or anyone else and we'll make sure to take care of you. Come out and make sure your buildings are compliant. Amazing. All right. Thanks for now. And we'll see everybody again soon.