Today we’d like to introduce you to Tyler Adkins.
Hi Tyler, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
Nancy Danielson grew up in Albuquerque, NM helping her dad, Dale, with the appliance repair business that he started in 1964. She cut her teeth as a kid, selling used appliances to customers that came into her dad’s shop. During her first marriage to help make ends meet she started her own microwave repair business which she ran successfully for about 18 months until the young married couple no longer needed the income as they headed off to California.
Nancy and I met in 2003 and after helping a couple of partners build a very successful start-up business for 4 1/2 years, found ourselves suddenly in a challenging time as that business bumped up against some financial issues.
Nancy and I liquidated down to a 10 X 10 storage unit and landed in Albuquerque staying with Dale and Betty, her mom, while we reset our life. After 5 months, 3 of which I spent apprenticing with Dale who many of his customers called “Doc” because he “healed” their appliances, I knew how to repair appliances and run an appliance repair company. As a serial entrepreneur with 6 successful business ventures under my belt and Nancy’s amazing marketing skills and business acumen, we moved back to DFW and started A+ Certified Appliance on July 1, 2008. Not surprisingly for her, Nancy had 2 clients waiting for us to arrive in Little Elm so I could go repair their appliances before we even arrived.
We quickly realized that our clients appreciated the need for regular maintenance to be performed on their appliances and started a Preventive Maintenance Program. After growing steadily for 11 years with lots of ups and downs, and mistakes made and corrected, the business had reached a point where we were very frustrated as we had plateaued and seemed like we were not generating as much profit as when I was doing almost everything myself. We had about 7 employees, and it felt like we were on a hamster wheel with the business going nowhere.
On March 29th, 2019, we sat down in an owner’s meeting, listed all the frustrations and problems we had been experiencing, and decided to “kill” off the company. Nancy even wrote out a death certificate, and even though the company remained A+ for a while, that was the birth of Doc Danielson Appliance Repair & Care.
Having intentionally sought out quite a bit of personal growth and development the previous year and with the help of coaches and consultants, through the grace of God, we transformed the company, survived Covid, doubled the number of employees and the revenue, and renamed it to Doc Danielson Appliance Repair & Care in September of 2022.
Now we are actively working on becoming a franchisor and focusing on being what Nancy has termed The Appliance Wellness company.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth ride.
Aside from the normal challenges of running a service business with employees that get sick and ice storms that shut you down for days, I would say our biggest struggle has been defining our identity and being that. We work on this daily, and I’m happy to say that after 14 1/2 years it is pretty clear. We are The Appliance Wellness Company.
We had a monthly subscription plan, which was our first attempt at preventive maintenance birthed out of our desire to be the antithesis of a home warranty. Home warranties seem to work to protect people when they first purchase a home, however, long term it doesn’t seem to work out for most folks compared to the money they spend.
The subscription plan was not structured correctly and after we discovered we were losing money, we eventually tweaked it to the Preventive Maintenance Plan we currently have.
For a while, we had a couple of family members working for us for a number of years and although that can sometimes be a good thing, in our case it was not. One of the hardest things we have ever done in our business was to send them on their way to help them find their place in the world. We are happy to report that one of them has become very successful in her own business and the other ironically enough is building his own appliance repair business and sometimes consults us on issues he is encountering, which we are more than happy to oblige.
Several years ago, we got talked into hiring a “CEO” who promised to help us build our company to great heights. His practices almost caused us to go out of business and we promptly let him go after only a few months. He also started an appliance repair company, copying our maintenance program which did not succeed.
After moving out of our game room in our house in Little Elm to a commercial space in Celina, we thought part of our “transformation” was going to be in expanding our services, and after a brief foray into plumbing and home renovation, we shut that down as we were aligned with the wrong people and again almost had to shut the company down.
Then in 2020, we got notice that we had been selected for a random sales tax audit with the Texas State Comptroller. We thought we had been collecting taxes properly; however, that was not how the state saw it, and all of a sudden, we owed a huge sum of money to the state. After a lot of prayer and consultation with those who we trust, we filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy to save the company from extinction, and we are currently in the process of paying that debt off as we work on growing and expanding.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We have been in the northern DFW area since 2008 and served over 19,000 households. We have an A+ rating with BBB, 4.8-star rating on Google with over 750 reviews, and we have received the Angi’s Super Service award for the last 10 years straight.
We have 3 major differentiators in our industry:
1. We perform preventive maintenance on laundry and kitchen appliances.
2. Our level of communication and service sets a new standard in the industry. We often have reviews where clients say that they will only use us as their appliance repair and maintenance company from now on.
3. We will be straight with you if we can either a) not come out to repair your appliance by providing a solution or letting a client know that it is not worth it or b) when we are there give you an honest assessment of where you appliance is at and if you should repair it.
We have over 75 years of combined experience to rely on for working on appliances repairing and maintaining them.
We offer a Dryer Fire Risk Assessment for $49 to make sure that our clients are safe from a house fire caused by the dryer catching on fire and that our clients have peace of mind.
In fact, our reason for existence states: We exist to enable and empower our clients, friends, and neighbors to prolong the lifespan of their appliances. To give them the knowledge, wisdom and understanding to make informed decisions about what works best for them.
What are your plans for the future?
As mentioned before, we are working on becoming a franchisor and expanding by awarding franchises primarily from Texas to Florida to start. We chose this model so that our clients will always have the experience of being serviced by a local company, their neighbor who has their best interests at heart.
Pricing:
- $49 for Dryer Fire Risk Assessment
- $99 for 30 mins of diagnosis
- $299 for Dryer Fire Prevention
- $499 for Whole House Appliance Wellness
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.docdanielson.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/docdanielson/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/docdanielsoncelina
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apluscertifiedappliance/
- Twitter: @docdanielsonfm
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@docdanielsonappliancerepai2200
Image Credits
Lanay Renstrom
