Nobody on earth was qualified to start our trade school. Not me, not my assistant, not my dad, who thought I was out of my mind. We did it anyway. Took the old building off the market, gutted the offices into classrooms, built a house in the back of the warehouse to train on. Top Tech Academy launched October 2020 with 12 in HVAC and 12 in plumbing. We couldn’t find the people, so we started making them.
@officialchadpetermanTranscript
We get to 2020 and the calls just keep rolling in. And we don't have enough people. And I make the assumption that like we're probably not going to find enough people. We're going to have to figure out a way to build our own. And at the time, we just moved from a 3000 square foot building into this big one. And now we need to train our own people. Like what the hell does that mean? So I went to my assistant at the time and I go, hey, quick ass, can you build a school to train technicians? And she's like, I've never done that before. I was like, I had to be easy. Like here, there's a few people that have done it. It'll be fine. We got this. So at the time, my dad owned our old building and he had put it up for sale. So I call my dad, hey dad, I got an idea for you. What if you didn't sell the building and the company just leased it from you? What do you think about that? Well, what do you need it for? We just moved into this massive building. I go, dad, we are going to build a school to train trades people. He goes, you are out of your mind. You don't even know how to do that. I was like, yeah, I know, but we're going to figure it out. And so he's like, all right, whatever. As long as the rent's paid, I don't give a shit what you do. So we take the office part and we knock down walls and we cut it into classrooms and then we go build basically a house in the back of the warehouse. And in the beginning of October in 2020, we launched the Peter van top tech academy. We had 12 in HVAC, 12 in plumbing, and we were going to just train our way to the top. It was going to be great.
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